Metre, Rhyme and Free Verse

by G.S. Fraser

First published in 1970, this work outlines the principles of English prosody in a way that will enable the reader to recognise and scan any piece of English verse. It illustrates the close relationship between English speech patterns and verse patterns, and the primary importance of the phenomenon of stress. It also discusses the suitability of various kinds of metrical pattern for various kinds of poetic effect. This book will be of interest to those studying poetry and English literature.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

96 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1970

About the author

George Sutherland Fraser was a Scottish poet, literary critic and academic.

During World War II he served in the British Army in Cairo and Eritrea. He was published as a poet in Salamander, a Cairo literary magazine. At the same time he was involved with the New Apocalyptics group, writing an introductory essay for the anthology The White Horseman, and formulating as well as anyone did the idea that they were successors to surrealism.

After the war he became a prominent figure in London's literary circles, working as a journalist and critic. Together with his wife Paddy he made friends with a gamut of literary figures, from the intellectual leader William Empson to the eccentric John Gawsworth. He worked with Ian Fletcher to have Gawsworth's Collected Poems (1949) published.

In 1949 he succeeded Edmund Blunden as Cultural Adviser to the UK Liaison Mission in Tokyo. This ended badly when he suffered a breakdown in 1951 while in Japan. Subsequently he was much less the poet than the all-purpose writer.

He became a lecturer at the University of Leicester in 1959, where he was an inspiring teacher, remaining there until retirement in 1979.

Reviews

[Lucas Lorente · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't know if I should count this as a read because I skipped like 30 pages on scansion, which is like half of the book. Fraser has some really interesting ideas, but most of the book is dedicated to the meaningless scholar use of scansion. Don't get me wrong, it's important to know how to scan a poem, but the level of small stupid details in this book is absurd. I liked the parts about rhyme and free verse. In general, I guess I was just expecting something that explained how to read, instead of how to analyse. Like what things about metre are interesting and how they add to the meaning of poems. How they form interesting sounds, what things look for, etc.

[Daphne Harries · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can NOT learn about the fundamentals of poetry from this. But you can develop your knowledge, and it is wickedly useful for metrical analysis once one has the capabilities to identify metre with relative ease. Rhyme is intrinsically linked to metre in poetical meaning, so the book provides a handy insight to how these two elements can function to create amphiboles and all sorts of literary chaos only a critic or avid poetry reader would identify

[Wyatt Reu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book as any to give succinct overview of meter/verse prosody. Used it mostly to supplement reading in Turco’s ‘Book of Forms’ which neglects to discuss free verse with any nuance.

[Richard Subber · Rating 2 out of 5]

Most of this short volume in The Critical Idiom series is a dusty deep dive with Fraser into obscure scholarly dissections of metre, rhyme, stress, and the enervating nuts and bolts of scansion, which I politely think of as ripping the flesh of a poem away to finger its technical elements. I respectfully suspect that this text is the stuff of doctoral dissertations.
Read more of my book reviews and poems here:
www.richardsubber.com

[S.B. Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short and a bit heavy going at times. The section on free verse, which I got it for is really not that helpful from a technical standpoint and is possibly outdated (in that it really only talks about Pound and Whitman). The discussion on scansion was interesting but not really for a beginner. A nice handy reference but you'd want some theory and practice under your belt before coming to it.