Moving words app

Derek Attridge FBA is a South African born British academic in the field of English literature and a current Professor of English at the University of York a post he has held since 2003. Moving word cloud The contemporary reader of English poetry is able to take pleasure in the sounds and movements of the English language in works written over the past eight centuries and to find poems that convey powerful emotions and vivid images from this entire period This book investigates the ways in which poets have exploited the resources of the language as a spoken medium its characteristic rhythms its phonetic qualities its deployment of syntax to write verse that continues to move and delight The chapters in the first of the two parts examine a number of issues relating to poetic form the resurgence of interest in formal questions in recent years the role of syntactic phrasing in the operation of poetry the function of rhyme and the relation between sound and sense The second part is concerned with rhythm and metre explaining and demonstrating beat prosody as a tool of poetic analysis and discussing three major traditions in English versification the free four beat form used in much popular verse the controlled power of the iambic pentameter and the twentieth century invention of free verse All these topics are discussed by means of particular case studies from the metrical form of a thirteenth century lyric to uses of sound in recent poetry Among the many poets whose work is considered are Spenser Milton Dryden Keats Tennyson Hardy Yeats Frost Ashbery Hill Plath Paterson and Prynne Drawing on Derek Attridge s thirty five years of engagement with the forms of poetry this volume provides extensive evidence of the importance of close attention to the moving and sounding of language in the poems we enjoy Moving Words Forms of English PoetryI bought this book out of frustration with an online poetry course They were teaching poetic rhythm using terms such as iambic pentameter Which would have been all very well if the examples given had not had quite often four beat lines that even with the best will in the world could not be considered to plod along . Words for moving slowly Derek Attridge popped in as Emeritus Professor and said something that gained my attention While the rest of the course tutors seemed determined to force poems to conform to a terminology of iambs trochees and so on he mentioned beat prosody So I really bought this book for part 2 Rhythm and Metre The other essays are interesting but the chapters that challenge the orthodoxy of past prosody really deserve a wider audience English