Read The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within for Free Online

piano or sketching sugar bowls and wineglasses for practice. You just get better and better and better as the extraordinary possibilities of this most basic form begin to open up.
    ‘Nothing more than taking a line for a walk.’ That is how the artist Paul Klee described drawing. It can be much the same with poetry.
    For the next few days, take lots of iambs for a walk and see where their feet lead you. With notebook in hand and a world of people, nature, thoughts, news and feelings to be compressed into iambic pentameter you are taking your first poetic steps.
    II
    End-stopping–enjambment–caesura–weak endings–trochaic and pyrrhic substitutions
    End-stopping, Enjambment and Caesura
    In our first exercise we looked at existing fragments of iambic pentameter:
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground.
    And we had a go at producing our own:
I haven’t time to take your call right now,
So leave a message when you hear the tone.
    In both examples each line contains a single thought that finishes with the line . This is called end-stopping , which we could mark like this.
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall.
I haven’t time to take your call right now.
    The iambic pentameter would be a dull dog indeed if that were all it could do.
    I have already included (in Poetry Exercise 1 ) a couplet from Wilfred Owen where the meaning doesn’t stop with the line, but RUNS ON through to the next:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
    No end-stopping there. The term used to describe such a running on is enjambment , from the French enjamber to stride, literally to get one’s leg over…
His mother was a learned lady, famed
For every branch of every science known.
B YRON: Don Juan , Canto I, X
So threatened he, but Satan to no threats
Gave heed, but waxing more in rage replied:
M ILTON: Paradise Lost , Book IV
    Look closely at those two examples above. Not only do they feature these run-ons or enjambments, which allow a sense of continual flow, they also contain pauses which break up that flow; in the examples above it happens that these pauses are expressed by commas that serve the office of a breath, or change of gear: I shall render them like this ¶.
His mother was a learned lady ¶ famed
For every branch of every science known.
So threatened he ¶ but Satan to no threats
Gave heed ¶ but waxing more in rage replied:
    The name for such a pause or break is a caesura 6 (from the Latin caedere, caesum, to cut. 7 You’d pronounce it as in ‘he says YOU’RE a fool’).
    Caesuras don’t by any means have to lead on to an enjambment as in the two examples above, however. You can have a caesura in an end-stopped line.
The woods decay ¶ the woods decay and fall.
St Agnes’ Eve ¶ Ah, bitter chill it was!.
And, spite of Pride ¶ in erring Reason’s spite.
One truth is clear ¶‘Whatever is, is right.’
    Not every comma will signal a caesura, by the way. In Poetry Exercise 1 I included this pair of lines from Paradise Lost :
Their wand’ring course, now high, now low, then hid
Progressive, retrograde, or standing still.
    Only the first comma of the first line is a caesura.
Their wand’ring course ¶ now high, now low, then hid.
Progressive, retrograde, or standing still.

    Commas in lists ( serial commas and Oxford commas as grammarians would call them–a now archaic usage of commas, placing them before conjunctions like ‘and’, ‘with’ and ‘or’) do not usually herald a caesura; though some readers might argue that the second comma of the second line above could betoken the small pause or breath that defines a caesura.
    How can a scrutiny of such minuscule nuances possibly help you in your writing of poetry? Well, you wait until Exercise 3: I confidently predict that you will astonish yourself.
    The fact is, enjambment and caesura, these two–what shall we call them? techniques, effects, tricks, devices,