Rhymes and Meters A Practical Manual for Versifiers

For one whose verse runs easily and whose occasional sales are an encouragement, this last chapter is perhaps unnecessary. Yet there may come times in routine, monotonous produc...

The Anglo Saxons were a hard-drinking race whose bards chanted interminable battle songs to tables of uncritical, mead-filled heroes. As a result the English language grew up wi...

Vers de société, "society verse," is a development of the last century; almost, one might say, of the last twenty-five years. In that time there has been composed a great volume...

In the seventeenth century the quatrain was a favorite tool of the old English writers who wished to embody a stinging epigram or epitaph in verse. The works of Robert Herrick c...

It is scarcely necessary to write a defense of verse making. As a literary exercise it has been recommended and practiced by every well-known English writer and as a literary as...

A variety of verse which has great vogue now and which has so developed as to be considered almost as individual as the rondeau or sonnet is the modern "song."

A metrical composition is divided into lines, each line containing a definite number of syllables. These syllables are grouped by twos and threes into "feet" which, by their mak...

The more one writes the better he becomes acquainted with what might be called "the tricks of the trade." These "tricks," "helps," or "devices" can be explained only in a genera...

To write good verse one must read good verse. The world has spun too long for a man to succeed who depends wholly on his own ideas; he must profit by the work of others. The mor...

A working knowledge of some foreign language--say French or German--is often very profitable to the verse maker. With a dictionary and a couple of text books he can make very go...

The rhyme most commonly used in verse is the single rhyme--the rhyme of one syllable. A single rhyme is perfect when the rhymed syllables are accented; when the vowel sounds and...

Roughly speaking, the stanza in verse corresponds to the paragraph in prose. It is a fixed division of the composition containing a certain number of lines arranged in a certain...