Amazon Book Description
- If you can speak and read English, you can write poetry.
- The trick is knowing where to start. Stephen Fry, who has long written poems, and indeed has written long poems, for his own private pleasure, invites you to discover the incomparable delights of metre, rhyme and verse forms.
- Whether you want to write a Petrarchan sonnet for your lover's birthday, an epithalamion for your sister's wedding or a villanelle excoriating the government's housing policy, The Ode Less Travelled will give you the tools and the confidence to do so.
- Brimful of enjoyable exercises, witty insights and simple step-by-step advice, The Ode Less Travelled guides the reader towards mastery and confidence in the Mother of the Arts.
Amazon Customer Review
- This is an absolute gem of a book. Get it if you are studying English at any level, get it if you want to appreciate the English language better, get it if you are an aspiring writer or poet, or if you merely want to have fun with the English language. Fry has produced the sort of book you wish you'd had at school when you did your A Level English, when you were at uni struggling with dry technical manuals on poetry. This book will especially be useful for home-schooling parents trying to give their teenagers some semblance of a classical education. The students of the Open University Creative Writing course bought this book because the normally excellent teaching materials from the OU couldn't beat this for style, simplicity, and ease of use for the "nuts and bolts" of poetry-writing. Rather than just a dull lecture about forms etc this book gives practical exercises which are simple and fun to do. Fry likens this book to the equivallent of a "how to paint" or "how to play the guitar" book. But I think it goes further than that.
- Fry leads you gently through the technical "precision language" of poetry, and by the end of it all you will know your iambic pentameter from your triolets. The book is simple, elegant, easy to explore, easy to absorb, and a fun read. I am a bibliophile, but I found myself appreciating Shakespeare's genius more, returning to the classics of English, Irish and Scots poetry and seeing them in a new light. This book explains why poetry is the beating heart of the English language. It is also a gentle, and funny, attack on the post-modern droggle which spills forth from pens of self-expressionists without form, function, reason, or beauty. For all his light touch, Fry's erudition is considerable, but he never patronises his reader. I would imagine that if Oscar Wilde was your English teacher, his lessons would look something like this. Lush, witty, and fun. Absolutely brilliant.
Book Comment
- Arrow, 6 September 2007. Paperback
- Recommended by Dave T, who remembered I used to write poetry at school.
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2026
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