If you love poetry as much as I do, you’ll delight in Brad Leithauser’s Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry (2022). Leithauser takes a deep dive into what poetry is and how it works. I learned something new on practically every page.
Leithauser discusses over 100 poets and quotes lines from about 50 poets from Gwendolyn Brooks to Shakespeare. On top of that, Leithauser quotes lyrics from Cole Porter to Lennon & McCartney. Within his analysis of the parts of poetry, Leithauser makes some unique connections; here’s an example of enjambments:
“One of the choicest enjambments I know belongs to under appreciated comic novelist Peter de Vries (1910-1993). His target is Byron’s ‘She Walks in Beauty,’ which begins
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudlesss climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes…
Here is de Vries:
She walks in beauty like the night
Watchman on appointed rounds,
In the nursery, checking children’s
Winter respiratory sounds.
Oh, the modern housewife! What a fall from grace from a supernal goddess to a shuffling, overburdened mom surrounded by wheezing children, and the whole comical cascade taking place in the which space between night and Watchman.” (p. 65)
While Leithauser sometimes deals with a dozen poets per page–both known and unknown (at least to me)–his examples always clarify the point he’s trying to make. For example, Leithauser stresses the difference between prose and poetry. “I adore Anthony Trollope’s portly novels (I’ve read more books by him, I suppose, than any other author), but I enter them with some effort. After two or three chapters, I’m typically not wholly engaged, and I proceed partly out of the justified confidence that an enchanter’s spell is indeed being woven, albeit gradually. By contrast, after devoting fifteen minutes to reading Tennyson closely, I’ve undergone a speedy immersion into nineteenth-century cadences, a nineteenth-century sensibility. Recall Marilyn Monroe: Poetry saves time. Or put it another way: Poetry asks us to slow down so we may speed up. Of all literary genres, poetry is the most successful time traveler.” (p. 327)
Rhyme’s Rooms is one of the best books on poetry that I’ve ever read. GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Author’s Note ix
Foreword: A First Step, A First Stop xi
Chapter 1 Meeting the Funesians 3
Chapter 2 The Prosodic Contract 16
Chapter 3 Poetic Architecture 29
Chapter 4 Stanzas 42
Chapter 5 Enjambment 54
Chapter 6 Defining and Refining 67
Chapter 7 The Marriage of Meter and Rhyme (I) 81
Chapter 8 Iambic Pentameter 95
Chapter 9 Iambic Tetrameter 110
Chapter 10 Rhyme and Rhyme Decay 125
Chapter 11 Spelling and the Unexpected Rhyme 139
Chapter 12 Rhyme Poverty, Rhyme Richness 154
Chapter 13 Rhymes, and How We Really Talk 166
Chapter 14 Off Rhyme: When Good Rhymes Go Bad 178
Chapter 15 Rim Rhyme 192
Chapter 16 The Marriage of Meter and Rhyme (II) 203
Chapter 17 Wordplay and Concision 217
Chapter 18 The Look of Poetry 229
Chapter 19 Song Lyrics 244
Chapter 20 Poetry and Folly 261
Chapter 21 Dining with the Funesians 277
Chapter 22 Drinking with the Funesians 294
Chapter 23 The Essential Conservatism of Poetry 308
Chapter 24 The Essential Radicalism of Poetry 324
Glossary 343
Permissions Credits 347
Acknowledgments 349
