The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms

by Mark Strand, Eavan Boland

Overview

"Concise, learned, revisionary... should enrich the passionate conversation about poetic forms for years to come."— Edward Hirsch, author of How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry

Two of our foremost poets provide here a lucid, straightforward primer that "looks squarely at some of the headaches and mysteries of poetic form": a book for readers who have always felt that an understanding of form (sonnet, ballad, villanelle, sestina, among others) would enhance their appreciation of poetry. Tracing "the exuberant history of forms," they devote one chapter to each form, offering explanation, close reading, and a rich selection of examplars that amply demonstrate the power and possibility of that form.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393321784
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/17/2001
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Eavan Boland (1944—2020) was the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, including Outside History and several volumes of nonfiction, and was coeditor of the anthology The Making of Poem. Born in Dublin, Ireland, she was one of the foremost female voices in Irish literature. She received a Lannan Foundation Award and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award, among other honors. She taught at Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, Bowdoin College, and Stanford University, where she was the director of the creative writing program.

Mark Strand (1934—2014) won the Pulitzer Prize for Blizzard of One and was Poet Laureate of the United States.

Table of Contents

	Introductory Statement	xiii
	On Becoming a Poet	xvii
	Poetic Form: A Personal Encounter	xxv
	Acknowledgments	xxxi
I	Verse Forms
	Overview	3
	The Villanelle
	The Villanelle at a Glance	5
	The History of the Form	6
	The Contemporary Context	8
	Villanelle of His Lady's Treasures	9
	The House on the Hill	9
	Missing Dates	10
	The Waking	11
	One Art	11
	Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night	12
	The World and the Child	13
	Condemned Site	13
	By the Sound	14
	Saturday at the Border	15
	Under the Hill	16
	Villanelle	16
	Reading Scheme	17
	Villanelle for the Middle of the Night	18
	Close-Up of a Villanelle: "One Art"	19
	The Sestina
	The Sestina at a Glance	21
	The History of the Form	22
	The Contemporary Context	24
	Ye wastefull woodes, bear witness of my woe	25
	from Old Arcadia	26
	Sestine 4 from Parthenophil and Parthenophe	27
	Sestina: Of the Lady Pietra degli Scrovigni	29
	Sestina	30
	Sestina	32
	Sestina of the Tramp-Royal	33
	Sestina: Altaforte	34
	After the Trial	36
	The Book of Yolek	37
	The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina	38
	Nani	39
	Close-Up of a Sestina: "Sestina: Altaforte"	41
	The Pantoum
	The Pantoum at a Glance	43
	The History of the Form	44
	The Contemporary Context	45
	In Town	45
	Pantoum of the Great Depression	47
	Parents' Pantoum	48
	Pantoum	49
	Grandmother's Song	50
	The Method	51
	Close-Up of a Pantoum: "Pantoum of the Great Depression"	53
	The Sonnet
	The Sonnet at a Glance	55
	The History of the Form	56
	The Contemporary Context	58
	Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?	59
	Farewell to Love	59
	from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus	60
	Sonnet XXIII: Methought I saw my late espoused saint	60
	Holy Sonnet: At the round earth's imagined corners	61
	Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802	61
	Ozymandias	62
	Bright Star	62
	from Monna Innominata	63
	from Sonnets from the Portuguese (XLIII)	63
	Carrion Comfort	64
	What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why	64
	From the Dark Tower	65
	Epic	65
	from "Tulips and Chimneys"	66
	To My Mother	66
	After the Bomb Tests	67
	A Game of Chess	67
	The Haw Lantern	68
	Heat	68
	The Roman Baths at Nimes	69
	Half a Double Sonnet	69
	Sonnet	70
	Close-Up of a Sonnet: "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why"	71
	The Ballad
	The Ballad at a Glance	73
	The History of the Form	74
	The Contemporary Context	77
	The Cherry-tree Carol	78
	Sir Patrick Spens	79
	The Wife of Usher's Well	81
	My Boy Willie	82
	The Changeling	83
	from The Ballad of Reading Gaol	86
	Peter and John	88
	Bagpipe Music	90
	Death in Leamington	91
	The Tale of Custard the Dragon	92
	We Real Cool	94
	Riverbank Blues	94
	Ballad of John Cable and Three Gentlemen	95
	Close-Up of a Ballad: "We Real Cool"	99
	Blank Verse
	Blank Verse at a Glance	101
	The History of the Form	102
	The Contemporary Context	104
	from his translation of The Aeneid	105
	from Tamburlaine the Great	105
	from Julius Caesar	106
	from Paradise Lost	107
	from Beachy Head	108
	from The Prelude	109
	Ulysses	110
	Rain	112
	Directive	113
	Lying	114
	Stanzas in Bloomsbury	117
	Close-Up of Blank Verse: "Directive"	119
	The Heroic Couplet
	The Heroic Couplet at a Glance	121
	The History of the Form	122
	from The Description of Cooke-ham	123
	The Author to Her Book	123
	A Letter to Daphnis, April 2, 1685	124
	from Absalom and Achitophel	125
	from The Vanity of Human Wishes	126
	To S. M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works	127
	from The Deserted Village	128
	from An Essay on Criticism	129
	My Last Duchess	130
	Strange Meeting	132
	The J Car	133
	Close-Up of the Heroic Couplet: "My Last Duchess"	135
	The Stanza
	The Stanza at a Glance	136
	The History of the Form	137
	The Contemporary Context	139
	from Troilus and Criseyde	140
	from The Faerie Queene	141
	They Flee from Me	142
	Easter Wings	143
	The Tyger	143
	So We'll Go No More A-Roving	144
	I died for Beauty--but was scarce	145
	The Convergence of the Twain	145
	The Song of the Mad Prince	146
	A Quoi Bon Dire	147
	Song of the Son	147
	The Tropics in New York	148
	Night Song at Amalfi	149
	Not Waving but Drowning	149
	On Teaching the Young	149
	Those Winter Sundays	150
	Yes	150
	Warming Her Pearls	151
	Epith	152
	Close-Up of a Stanza: "I died for Beauty--but was scarce"	154
II	Meter
	Meter at a Glance	159
	A Brief Checklist of Further Reading on Meter	161
III	Shaping Forms
	Overview	165
	The Elegy
	Overview	167
	Lament for the Makaris	168
	If Ever Hapless Woman Had a Cause	171
	On My First Son	172
	Epitaph. On her Son H.P. at St. Syth's Church where her body also lies Interred	172
	Lycidas	173
	Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House July 10th, 1666. Copied out of a Loose Paper	178
	Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard	180
	R. Alcona to J. Brenzaida	184
	O Captain! My Captain!	185
	Dover Beach	185
	To His Love	187
	Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter	187
	Tears in Sleep	188
	In Memory of W. B. Yeats	188
	from The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket	191
	Dream Song 324	194
	To the Dead	194
	In Memoriam Paul Celan	196
	The Legend	197
	The Elegy for New York	198
	Tiara	199
	Supernatural Love	200
	Mirror in February	202
	Iris	203
	Child Burial	204
	Song	205
	The Pastoral
	Overview	207
	The Passionate Shepherd to His Love	209
	from Love's Labor's Lost	210
	The Garden	210
	To My Sister	213
	Ode on a Grecian Urn	214
	Loveliest of Trees	215
	The Wife of Llew	216
	Urban Pastoral	216
	Remembered Morning	217
	The Thought-Fox	217
	The Explosion	218
	Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota	219
	Midsummer, Tobago	220
	The Bear	220
	Fog	223
	Let Evening Come	224
	Smoke	224
	Meditation at Lagunitas	226
	From the Porch	227
	A Walrus Tusk from Alaska	227
	Looking West from Laguna Beach at Night	228
	The Broad Bean Sermon	229
	Of the Finished World	230
	Tornados	231
	Loss	232
	Waiting for the Storm	233
	An Engraving of Blake	233
	Pygmalion's Image	233
	Mock Orange	234
	The Black Walnut Tree	235
	Gateposts	236
	Heart of the Matter	236
	Shoeing the Currach	238
	The Ode
	Overview	240
	Ode to the West Wind	241
	To Autumn	243
	Ode	244
	The Fire of Driftwood	245
	from The Bridge	247
	The Paper Nautilus	248
	Australia 1970	249
	Miracle Glass Co.	250
	The Blue Swallows	250
	America	252
	Ode to Meaning	252
	Perhaps the World Ends Here	254
IV	Open Forms
	Overview	259
	The Circus Animals' Desertion	260
	The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock	262
	I, Too	266
	The Idea of Order at Key West	266
	Spring and All	268
	America	269
	Ave Maria	272
	Uncertain Oneiromancy	273
	Daddy	274
	Diving into the Wreck	276
	Move	279
	The Language of the Brag	280
	The Colonel	281
	The German Army, Russia, 1943	282
	Starlight Scope Myopia	282
	Reading Plato	284
	Close-Up of Open Forms: "Diving into the Wreck"	287
	A Brief Glossary	289
	Biographies and Further Reading	293
	Suggested Reading	335
	Credits	337
	General Index	349
	Index of Authors, Titles, and First Lines	357

Editorial Reviews

"A generous and exquisitely selective anthology of poetry forms that may make you decide to give up E-mail and start writing sestinas and villanelles."

Elle - Francine Prose

"A marvelous new anthology... intended for readers daunted by terminology and complex poetic forms."

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"This is the book writers and readers, teachers and students, have been dreaming of—canny, generous, and practical, Boland and Strand are ideal guides through the golden labyrinth of poetry at its most ingenious and commanding. A marvelous collection!"

J. D. McClatchy

"Much more poetry than commentary appears, making the book both a splendid classroom text and, since the selections are top-drawer poems by first-rate poets, a book any poetry lover or would-be poetry lover may learn from and love."

Booklist

Poetry's Ingredients: Mark Strand and Eavan Boland Explore Form

Explaining beauty is hard work. But distinguished poets Mark Strand and Eavan Boland have produced a clear, super-helpful book that unravels part of the mystery of great poems through an engaging exploration of poetic structure. Strand and Boland begin by promising to "look squarely at some of the headaches" of poetic form: the building blocks of poetry. The Making of a Poem gradually cures many of those headaches.

Strand, who's won the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship and has served as U.S. Poet Laureate, and Boland, an abundantly talented Irish poet who has also written a beautiful book of essays on writing and womanhood, are both accustomed to teaching. Strand, now at the University of Chicago, and Boland, a Stanford professor, draw upon decades in the classroom to anticipate most questions.

Ever wonder what a pantoum is? A villanelle? A sestina? With humor, patience, and personal anecdotes, Strand and Boland offer answers. But the way they answer is what makes this book stand out. The forms are divided into three overarching categories: metrical forms, shaping forms, and open forms. "Metrical forms" include the sonnet, pantoum, and heroic couplet. "Shaping forms" explains broader categories, like the elegy, ode, and pastoral poem. And "open forms" offers new takes on the traditional blueprints, exploring poems like Allen Ginsberg's "America."

Each established form is then approached in three ways, followed by several pages of outstanding poems in that form. First, the editors offer a "page at a glance" guide, with five or six characteristics of that specific form presented in a brief outline. For example, the pantoum is defined like this:

   1) Each pantoum stanza must be four lines long.

   2) The length is unspecified but the pantoum must begin and end with the same line.

   3) The second and fourth lines of the first quatrain become the first and third line of the next, and so on with succeeding quatrains.

   4) The rhyming of each quatrain is abab.

   5) The final quatrain changes this pattern.

   6) In the final quatrain the unrepeated first and third lines are used in reverse as second and fourth lines.

With this outline, it's easy to identify the looping pantoum. In the second piece of the pantoum section, Strand and Boland include a "History of the Form" section, again condensed to one page. Here, we learn that the pantoum is "Malayan in origin and came into English, as so many other strict forms have, through France." Indeed, both Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire tried their hands at the pantoum. As always, Strand and Boland offer some comparison to the other forms, which helps explain why a poet might choose to write a pantoum over, say, a sonnet or a sestina:

"Of all verse forms the pantoum is the slowest. The reader takes four steps forward, then two steps back. It is the perfect form for the evocation of a past time."

Next, the editors include "The Contemporary Context," which introduces several of the pantoums of this century. Finally, in what may be the book's best feature, they provide a close-up of a pantoum, an approach they repeat for each form discussed. In this case, it's the "Pantoum of the Great Depression" by Donald Justice. The editors offer some biographical information on Justice, and then they map out how that specific poem gets its power.

This "poet's explanation" of the workings of a poem is invaluable, especially when it comes from leading poets such as Stand and Boland. What's more, these remarks are transferable. Reading how Strand and Boland view a dozen poems transforms the way one reads. With any future poem, you can look for what Strand and Boland have found in the greats.

The editors offer their readers a great start, with a list for further reading and a helpful glossary. If anything can get a person excited about poetry, this selection of poems can -- though the editors, as working poets, readily admit their choices are idiosyncratic.

Gems here include the best work of lesser-known poets, including several "poets' poets." For example, Edward Thomas, a prominent reviewer in his day and a close friend of Robert Frost's, is represented by "Rain," an absolutely brilliant blank-verse poem which begins:

      Rain, midnight rain, nothing but wild rain
      On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
      Remembering again that I shall die
      And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
      For washing me cleaner than I have been
      Since I was born into this solitude.

Thomas's poem -- and other treasures here -- introduces readers to what and how poets read to learn to make poems. Of course, many of the usual suspects are found here, but the surprises are exciting, and even the old favorites seem new when the editors explain why and how a particular poem seems beautiful. This is particularly evident in their discussion of Edna St. Vincent Millay's rushing, initially breathless sonnet "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and How, " which reads:

      What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
      I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
      Under my head till morning, but the rain
      Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
      Upon the glass and listen for reply,
      And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
      For unremembered lads that not again
      Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
      Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree
      Nor knows what birds have vanquished one by one,
      Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
      I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
      I only know that summer sang in me
      A little while, that in me sings no more.

In the "close-up" section, Strand and Boland offer an biographical paragraph that mentions that in 1923, Millay became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. They then discuss Millay's "distinctive and unusual" approach to the sonnet form: "Instead of taking the more leisurely pace of the public sonnet that had been the 19th-century model, she drove her sonnets forward with a powerful lyric music and personal emphasis."

The editors point out Millay's heavy reliance on assonance and alliteration, and then note how she takes advantage of the different tempos the sonnet offers:

"Here she uses her distinctive music and high diction to produce an unusually quick-paced poem in the first octave and then a slower, more reflective septet where the abandoned lover becomes a winter tree. This ability of the sonnet, to accommodate both lyric and reflective time, made it a perfect vehicle for highly intuitive twentieth-century poets like Millay."

That simple explanation of the sonnet as a form able to "accommodate both lyric and reflective time" helps clarify most sonnets. But Strand and Boland are careful not to explain everything. The deepest beauty, as they explain in their introductory essays on their attraction to form, is built on mystery. And it is that attempt to understand the greatest mysteries that defines the greatest poems.

Similarly, mystery often drives poets to write, as Strand explains in his essay on Archibald MacLeish's "You, Andrew Marvell," which Strand describes as the first poem he wished he had written himself in his early years as a poet:

"Although I no longer wish I had written 'You, Andrew Marvell,' I wish, however, that I could write something like it, something with its sweep, its sensuousness, its sad crepuscular beauty, something capable of carving out such a large psychic space for itself&. There is something about it that moves me in ways I don't quite understand, as it were communicating more than what it actually says. This is often the case with good poems -- they have a lyric identity that goes beyond whatever their subject happens to be."

With this book, Strand and Boland help quantify the explicable parts of a "lyric identity." Understanding form, the editors believe, is one way to begin understanding a poem's beauty. This lucid, useful book is a wonderful guide to that mysterious music.

—Aviya Kushner

bn.com

Concise, learned, revisionary... should enrich the passionate conversation about poetic forms for years to come.

Edward Hirsch

If example is the best teacher, than students new to traditional poetic forms can learn much from this collection of villanelles, sestinas, sonnets, elegies, pastorals, ballads, pantoums, odes, and other familiar structures that have shaped English poetry since Beowulf. Each chapter focuses on a single form, but explanatory material is kept to a minimum: a concise list of formal characteristics, a summary history, a short discussion of the form's contemporary context, and a brief "close up" on an individual poem. Most useful are the selections themselves, which illustrate how particular forms have been employed over time, from canonical classics by Chaucer, Shelley, and Elizabeth Bishop through newer pieces by Hayden Carruth, Michael Palmer, and Thylias Moss. The concluding section on open forms seems somewhat uncertain and conservative, barely straying from much of what precedes it, but that's to be expected given the tastes of the editors, each of whom provides a lively and personal introductory essay that young poets should find quite instructive.--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib. Ithaca, NY Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Library Journal

This anthology traces the history of poetic forms by example and explanation. Each chapter begins with a brief summary of the structure and origin of a particular form, followed by multiple examples. The authors, who are working poets, present selections in the villanelle, sestina, sonnet, ode, and pastoral forms, among others. The final section examines the open forms of modern poetry. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Asking two working poets to collectively construct an anthology about poetic form can be a risky proposition. Decisions about which forms to present, which poems most effectively illustrate those forms, and in what context to offer them would be a struggle for even one poet to come to terms with. In this anthology, Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Strand (The Weather of Words, etc.) and Stanford creative writing director Eavan Boland (The Lost Land, etc.) combine their poetic savvy to respond to these issues, resulting in a practical introduction to understanding poetic form. Strand and Boland divide the collection up into sections on metrical, shaping, and open forms. Each section offers outlines of the mechanics associated with each type of poem, a brief history of the form, and a thoughtful collection of poems representative of the form's evolution through history. Each chapter concludes with a brief "close-up" reading of one of the provided poems, which helps situate it in a historical dialog with its poetic ancestors and descendants. Thus Gwendolyn Brooks' Harlem Renaissance ballad "Sadie and Maud" is provocatively situated next to an excerpt from Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." In addition to the ballad, Strand and Boland use this format to introduce and provoke thought about the villanelle, the sestina, the pantoum, the sonnet, blank verse, the heroic couplet, the stanza, the elegy, the pastoral, the ode, and modern open forms. A practical handbook on poetic form for teachers, students, and poets who are interested both in the structural mechanics and literary heritage of poetic forms.

Kirkus Reviews