Learning the Secrets of English Verse

Preface.- Introduction.- Part One: Metrical Forms.- 1. Anglo-Saxon Alliterative Strong-Stress Meter.- 2. Ballad Meter.- 3. Stress-Based Imitations of Classical Forms: The Sapphic and the Catullan Hendecasyllable.- Interchapter: An Explanation of Scansion.- 4. Iambic Tetrameter.- 5. Iambic Pentameter and Blank Verse.- 6. Triple Meters: Dactyls and Anapests.- 7. Free Verse: A) Whitmanian Versicles, B) Loose Iambics, C) Syllabics, D) Unrhymed Stressing, E) Free Rhyming, F) Prose Rhythms and the Variable Foot.- 8. Nonce Meters.- Part Two: Stanza Forms.-9. Couplets.- 10. Terza Rima.- 11. Quatrains.- 12. Cinquains and Sextains.- 13. Rhyme Royal.- 14. Ottava Rima.- 15. Spenserian Stanzas.- 16. The Sonnet and Eugene Onegin Stanzas.- 17. Nonce Stanza.

David J. Rothman is the CEO/President of the Jackson Hole Center for the Arts in Jackson, Wyoming. His most recent publication is a poetry chapbook from Lithic Press, My Brother's Keeper (2019). In 2018 he won a Pushcart Prize for the poem "Kernels," which originally appeared in The New Criterion. In 2017 he published Belle Turnbull: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades), co-edited with Jeffrey Villines. In addition to many other books, his poems, essays and scholarly work have appeared widely, in journals including Agni, Appalachia, Atlantic Monthly, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, Mountain Gazette, New Criterion, Poetry, Sewanee Review, Threepenny Review and scores of other newspapers, journals and books. He co-founded the Crested Butte Music Festival, was the founding Publisher and Editor of Conundrum Press (now an imprint of Bower House Books of Denver), and has served as Resident Poet with Colorado Public Radio and as Poet Laureate of Colorado's Western Slope (2017-'19). He has taught at many colleges and universities, including the University of Utah, the University of Colorado, New York University, and Zhejiang University (People's Republic of China). From 2014-'18 he served as Director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University, where he also directed the poetry concentration, edited the journal THINK, and served as director of the conference Writing the Rockies. He has also taught for many decades at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, where in 2012 he won the Beacon Award for excellence in teaching.


Susan Delaney Spear is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Colorado Christian University where she serves as English Department Chair. Prior to that; she taught at Chatfield Senior High School for eight years. She earned an MFA in Poetry with an Emphasis on Verse Forms from Western Colorado University in 2012. From 2013 to 2019 she served as Managing Editor of

"A poet/educator and fellow teacher attempt the impossible: a rigorous textbook that provides creative writing students 'the building blocks of verse in a progressive, well-organized, and clear way,' with instruction 'in every major meter and repeating stanza form in English'-without killing the works themselves in the dissection. Casual readers are advised not to try to ingest the result whole, but rather to consult as needed while exploring poetry." (Harvard Magazine, harvardmagazine.com, Issue 1, 2023)