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.