Arts & Entertainment, Writing
Sound Pleasures
Lesson time 14:43 min
Learn the tools beyond rhyme and meter that Billy utilizes to achieve a musical, toe-tapping kind of joy in his poetry.
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Topics include: The Disappearance of Rhyme and Meter · How to Establish Trust With Your Reader · Speech Rhythms
Teaches Reading and Writing Poetry
In his first-ever online class, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins teaches you how to find joy, humor, and humanity in reading and writing poetry.
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[MUSIC PLAYING] - Until about 100 plus years ago, form meant basically two things. It just meant rhyme-- end rhyme, rhymes at the ends of lines-- and meter, a steady beat that would keep the poem stabilized and also would give the poem a kind of predictability. The reader would know the beat's going to continue. So when you read "Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though," " you pretty much can relax into the arms of Robert Frost because you know he's going to continue this know, blow, snow end rhyme. And he's going to keep this-- what's a tetrameter beat, four beats to the line-- he's going to keep that going. And that little engine of the meter is going to continue until the end. So if there's a predictability in it, and immediately, you're kind of oriented to the rest of the poem. You don't know what the poem's going to actually say, but you feel at ease in the hands of the poet. I was giving a reading at a school somewhere recently, and we had the question and answer session at the end. And there was a little girl, about seven or eight years old, in the front row with her mother, who was a fairly agitated young creature. And so I let her have the last question. And she said, "How come your poems don't rhyme?" She was used to nursery rhymes and younger poetry. And there was another occasion when I was giving a reading in England in kind of a rural town there, a man stood up in worsted, heavy tweed jacket, and said, "How come all your poems are written in prose?" And if this had been Oscar Wilde, I would have been devastated. But he basically was missing the same thing that the young girl was missing. He was missing this song, the song-like quality of regular rhyme and constant meter. And those are sound pleasures and toe-tapping kind of pleasure. The pleasure of the dance and the pleasure of the musicality. And why shouldn't poetry have those? Well, it can have them still, but in a less concentrated and a less predictable way. [MUSIC PLAYING] Whitman was the first poet to take regular meter and end rhyme away, so both of the training wheels that kept poetry going were removed. Well, guess what? The bicycle kept going. And it started the debate in the 1850s about whether "Song of Myself," Whitman's long poem, whether that was poetry or not. And one rather Prussian professor said, "If this is not poetry, it is something greater than poetry," which is quite a piece of literary criticism. I think Whitman had a general radical vision of himself as a poet. He was a great self-advertiser. His picture on his book is of a rough. He's outdoors. He's got his slouched hat. His shirt is open. It's not the formal, indoor, conservative literary portrait that most poets would have then. So as part of his radical sense of himself as a liberator-- sexual and social-- I think he thought of himself as a liberator of the regularity of formal verse. But he knew that he had to put something in if...
About the Instructor
Known for his wit and wisdom, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins is one of America’s most beloved contemporary poets. In his MasterClass, Billy teaches you to appreciate the emotional pull of poetry. Learn his approach to exploring subjects, incorporating humor, and finding your voice. Discover the profound in the everyday, and let poetry lead you to the unexpected.
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Billy Collins
In his first-ever online class, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins teaches you how to find joy, humor, and humanity in reading and writing poetry.
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