Preface
Why would anyone want to try to write a dictionary of poetry?
And in fact I did find certain books that were, in one way or another, useful to assign in workshops and writing classes and writers conferences. Among these books were the following: Babette Deutsch, Poetry Handbook; Karl Shapiro and Robert Beum, "A Prosody Handbook; Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics; "Paul Fussell, Jr., "Poetic Meter and Poetic Form; " and Lewis Turco, "The Book of Forms. "I felt these books were the best of the bunch, and I still think so. Of course there were many other technical books on the craft of poetry, which are listed in the bibliography at the back of this book, and some of them contain much that is useful.
Even so, the thought stayed with me over the years that most prosody books and books on poetics tended to be too partisan or pedantic or parochial. I felt they were either too technically specialized to be of much use to the practicing writer or, what was far worse, they seemed to be aiming at the lowest common denominator, as if one could ever learn craft or solid poetics from studying examples of middling works or doing a lot of virtuoso exercises on a metricalharpsichord. I began to feel that what was really needed was a single-volume poetry dictionary where a reader/writer could find brief and accurate definitions of the various poetic devices, together with a larger overview of the uses of these devices from the entire range of master poems of world poetry.
Not that such a book would be easy to write, and I dreaded my own determination to go in this direction. How would I complete all the staggering research necessary to put such a book together? If this book were to be done correctly, as I envisaged it, it would have to draw from the earliest epic poetry of Homer and Virgil and Ovid, through the lyric poetry of Sappho and Catullus, and all the Anglo-Saxon ballads and Middle English songs, and the Medieval Troubadour tradition that culminates in Dante's massive "Commedia." It would have to include the English Renaissance and Shakespeare and the poetry of Spenser and Sidney and Wyatt and Drayton and Mark Alexander Boyd as well as the romantic poets, Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth and Byron and Coleridge. I'd have to add the modern and postmodern movements of Imagism and Symbolism and Surrealism and Dada and automatic writing as practiced by Andre Breton and Gertrude Stein, and the twentieth-century renaissance of contemporary English and American poetry as heralded by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. It should also represent some of the outstanding performance lyrics of poets such as Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Judy Collins. And this book should also take note of the prevalent historical theories of poetry, drawn from such great Western minds as Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Gascoigne, Sidney, Coleridge, Saintsbury, Shelley, Poe, Pound, Eliot,Yvor Winters, Empson, I. A. Richards, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Allen Ginsberg. And to be truly catholic and representative of world poetry, the book should also represent a hefty amount of verse from outside our mainstream Western tradition-from the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Persia, China, Japan, India, Africa, and all the emerging Third World nations.
No thank you! It was too much of a job and I had too many other things to do with my life. But after a couple of years of stalling on the project and pretending the problem didn't exist, I began to come back to it in the mid-1980s and decided to write a proposal for a single-volume poetry dictionary which would be the complete handbook on prosody and poetics for the practicing writer. I gradually began the enormous task of research and arrangement of the book itself. And I began to hammer out a style of writing definitions and citing examples that would be clear, simple, and immediately useful to readers and writers and students of poetry on any level of competence.
In addition, this book tries to explore the full implication of the words "contemporary" and "poetry" in light of our experience in the world today. It also discusses why and how formal structure is related to meaning in a poem, as well as the possibilities of placement on the page and how line arrangement can affect a reader's perception of a poem. The book also considers how rhythm and image and voice can ultimately coalesce in the very greatest poetry.
Now that the work has been done, I can lean back and feel a tremendous gladness that so much of my life has been centered around poetry. During my senior year at Stanford University in themid-1950s, where I was majoring in philosophy, I felt I was the only one who didn't have the remotest idea of what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. And that was when I began to write poetry. Those first poems were all miraculously automatic, they came effortlessly and usually all in one piece. Maybe this was simply the lyricism of late adolescence, when one experiences the pulse of possibility in every body part. Whatever it was, I began to write endlessly: poems about love, poems about spring, poems about death, and poems about poems.
At the same time, I wanted to learn as much as I could about the craft of poetry. I began taking various poetry writing classes on both the west and east coasts--with Allen Ginsberg at San Francisco State College, with Stanley Kunitz at the New School, with Yvor Winters at Stanford, and with Leonie Adams at Columbia University.
From 1956 to 1965, I worked for Elizabeth Kray at the Poetry Center of the YMHA in New York, where I introduced guest poets during the scheduledseason. This was a rare opportunity for me to meet and talk with some of the greatest poets of our time--W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, Robert Lowell, Archibald MacLeish, Richard Eberhart, Carl Sandburg, Richard Wilbur, Kenneth Rexroth, W. S. Merwin, William Meredith, John Ciardi, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Isabella Gardner, Stephen Spender, Louis Untermeyer, Muriel Rukeyser, Peter Viereck, and many, many others.
In 1965, my alexandrine translation of Racine's "Phedre "was produced off-Broadway starring Beatrice Straight and Mildred Dunnock, directed by Paul-Emile Deiber of the Comedie-Francaise, and produced by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Theatre Arts. At about that time Louise Bogan became seriously ill, so I took over her poetry writing classes, which I have been teaching ever since. I've also taught poetry writing at other colleges and at various writers conferences.
In 1969 I founded "The New York Quarterly, "a magazine devoted to the craft of poetry. Over the last twenty years, the NYQ Craft Interviews have become a regular feature of the
This handbook defines the tools, terms, and techniques of poetry. Arranged alphabetically from "accent" to "zeugma," The Poets Dictionary is clear, superb, and complete.