One Does Not Become A Guru By

It Normally Happens That If You Put Two Words Together, Or Two Syllables Together, One Of Them Will Attract More Weight, More Emphasis, Than The Other. In Other Words, Most So-called Spondees Can Be Read As Either Iambs Or Trochees.

At Four Lines, With The Quatrain, We Reach The Basic Stanza Form Familiar From A Whole Range Of English Poetic Practice. This Is The Length Of The Ballad Stanza, The Verse Of A Hymn, And Innumerable Other Kinds Of Verse.

One Problem We Face Comes From The Lack Of Any Agreed Sense Of How We Should Be Working To Train Ourselves To Write Poetry.

Lyric Poetry Is, Of Course, Musical In Origin. I Do Know That What Happened To Poetry In The Twentieth Century Was That It Began To Be Written For The Page. When It's A Question Of Typography, Why Not? Poets Have Done Beautiful Things With Typography - Apollinaire's 'calligrammes,' That Sort Of Thing.

The Basic Rhymes In English Are Masculine, Which Is To Say That The Last Syllable Of The Line Is Stressed: "lane" Rhymes With "pain", But It Also Rhymes With "urbane" Since The Last Syllable Of "urbane" Is Stressed. "lane" Does Not Rhyme With "methane".