Moving Words

Readers of English verse can enjoy the sounds and motion of the language in poems written across roughly eight centuries, and find work from every part of that span that carries strong feeling and sharp imagery. Attridge examines how poets have drawn on English as something heard and spoken: its natural rhythms, its sound patterns, and the way syntax shapes a line. The first part considers the renewed interest in formal concerns in recent years, the part syntactic phrasing plays in how a poem works, the purpose of rhyme, and the connection between sound and meaning.

The second part turns to rhythm and metre. It explains and applies 'beat prosody' as a method for analysing poems, then looks at three major traditions in English: the loose four-beat line common in popular verse, the disciplined power of iambic pentameter, and the free verse that emerged in the twentieth century. Each point is illustrated through specific case studies, ranging from the metrical design of a thirteenth-century lyric to the use of sound in contemporary poetry. Poets discussed include Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Keats, Tennyson, Hardy, Yeats, Frost, Ashbery, Hill, Plath, Paterson and Prynne.

Written by Derek Attridge, whose thirty-five years of work on poetic form inform the study, the book makes a detailed case for close attention to how language moves and sounds in the poems people value most.