Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse

Pulitzer-prize winning poet and National Book Award winner, Mary Oliver, provides a graceful manual on the mechanics of poetical composition.?
Poets and those who simply want to understand poetry will enjoy this study of poetry as a conscious craft.?
Breaking down the basics with examples from well-known poems, Oliver shows how the dimensions of sound and rhythm (musicality) and lyrical words (assonance, alliteration, etc.) can combine to make powerful verse. She enables readers to "enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure that intensify both the poem's narrative and its ideas."

Format: Paperback
ISBN-13/EAN: 9780395850862
ISBN-10: 039585086X
Pages: 208
Price: $14.99
Publication Date: 07/27/1998
Carton Quantity: 48
Age(s): 14,15,16
Grade(s): 9-12

Author

Mary Oliver

A private person by nature, Mary Oliver (1935–2019) gave very few interviews over the years. Instead, she preferred to let her work speak for itself. And speak it has, for the past five decades, to countless readers. Over the course of her long and illustrious career, Oliver received numerous awards. Her fourth book, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. She 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.

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