Rules For The Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse

Oliver, Mary

ISBN 10: 039585086X / ISBN 13: 9780395850862

Published by Ecco, 1998

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 090725/kil/1hhg

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Rules For The Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse
• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 039585086X
• ISBN 13: 9780395850862
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dimensions: 1.321W x 13.716H x 20.828D centimeters 1.321 centimeters width by 13.716 centimeters height by 20.828 centimeters depth
• Weight: 227 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Pulitzer-prize winning poet and National Book Award winner, Mary Oliver, provides a graceful manual on the mechanics of poetical composition.

"True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, / As those move easiest who have learned to dance,” wrote Alexander Pope. “The dance,” in the case of this brief and luminous book, refers to the interwoven pleasures of sound and sense to be found in some of the most celebrated and beautiful poems in the English language, from Shakespeare to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Robert Frost. With a poet’s ear and a poet’s grace of expression, Mary Oliver helps us understand what makes a metrical poem work—and enables readers, as only she can, to “enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure.”

With an anthology of fifty poems representing the best metrical poetry in English, from the Elizabethan Age to Elizabeth Bishop.

About the Author

Mary Oliver (1935–2019), one of the most popular and widely honored poets in the U.S., was the author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose. Over the course of her long and illustrious career, she received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for American Primitive in 1984. Oliver also received the Shelley Memorial Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship; an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Achievement Award; the Christopher Award and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for House of Light; the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems; a Lannan Foundation Literary Award; and the New England Booksellers Association Award for Literary Excellence. She lived most of her life in Provincetown, Massachusetts.