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
George—check your Byron quote: the third line should end “dark and bright”.
My favorite poem is Wallace Stevens’s “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm”:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57607/the-house-was-quiet-and-the-world-was-calm
Deb, thanks for the heads up! I made the correction. I love Wallace Stevens, too! Especially “The Snow Man.”
The revered Tonawandan Kelley
Wandered into his favorite deley
Saying, “Poems are all right,
But at this hour of night
I’d rather put food in my belley!”
Jerry, with all that Florida heat, try Wallace Steven’s “The Snow Man”:
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
So not for me. Poetry and Me, just not compatible.
Jeff: “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” Robert Frost
This looks very worthwhile. I’ll have to track down a copy. Thanks for the tip.
Byron, RMYME’S ROOMS is well worth a look.
Most of the poetry I’ve read consists of limericks on bathroom walls!
Hey, I’m kidding!
Enjambment, indeed!
Bob, I always think of you as a metaphor.
Sounds like a useful book.
Out of curiosity, does he restrict himself to typically English forms or does he get into some of the French forms too (e.g. sestinas and villanelles)?
Randy, mostly English forms.
Leithauser shares your tendency to misapply “underappreciated”–unless you both mean that your subjects deserve universal appreciation!…de Vries is perhaps the most highly-rated humorist (among those who generally have been paid to make appreciative noises in public fora) of his generation who never took on an a/v career as well as a literary one…and Leithauser conflates “housewife” with “mother of infants” in the de Vries…
I like a lot of poetry, but like the cadences of prose more readily. Which might help me (like Fritz Leiber, who was the first I encountered to verbalize this) be the relatively slow reader I have been for most of my life…and often will have regretted it when I’ve read too quickly, as with Leiber’s own CONJURE WIFE, where, so caught up in it, I raced past the most telling moment in the novel and, several paragraphs into the next chapter, realized OH…and returned to the previous chapter to reread that.
William Stafford, Dorothy Parker and Stephen Vincent Benet rank among my lifelong favorites…but you do have my curiosity stoked, George.
Todd, they don’t call me George the Tempter for nothing! Glad I’ve stroked your curiosity! Sadly, de Vries seems almost forgotten now. I agree that he is a great humorist, but very few people read him any more. Even fewer people blog about him. I plan to post a FFB with a De Vries novel sometime soon.