Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction

I bought this book after coming across it in Nicholson Baker's "The Anthologist".I am an amateur poet and Attridge clearly,simply explains why English sounds the way it does.It is very readable with examples and exercises along the way.While not a text book,were I teaching poetry this would would be one of the main books that I'd use.It slows you down,as you should be when either reading or writing poetry.It covers all forms and ages of poetry from Middle English to rap,both rhymed and free verse.I would recommend this book to anyone who reads or writes poetry.

Filled with good, helpful tips.

Attridge is a careful and helpful reader of English poetry. This book, one of several he has written on the subject, is both elementary and profound. The field is fraught with difficulties and ambiguities, but Attridge sensibly avoids the silly stuff. He provides a helpful summary with each chapter, and numerous exercises that are both instructive and enjoyable. This is the kind of book one feels ought to mark a turning point in the study of prosody. If others may be persuaded to adopt his system of scansion, the field will be enormously rejuvenated. Having read it, one returns to earlier work by Fussell, Gross, Hartman and others wishing they might revise their books accordingly. In any case, the book is spirited, wide-ranging, and important.

An excellent book, very clearly laid out and enormously interesting in its insights. When it comes to Attridge's methods, I am sort of working backwards. I started with his most recent publication on metre and form, 'Moving Words', and am only reading these earlier cornerstones now, but they are no less interesting for that. Attridge offers a fascinating alternative to foot prosody in approaching metrics, and while I am always reluctant to call anything the last word on anything, his method certainly opened up fascinating new ways of thinking about English rhythm and metre.People familiar with his system of scansion might be surprised by the notational system used in this book (slashes, 'x' and underlining as opposed to the alphabet-based scansion he uses elsewhere). As Attridge himself points out, the transition between the two systems is actually very very simple, and the final pages of the books offer an excellent guide to moving from one method of notation to the other.The clarity of that guide is characteristic of the book as a whole. This is a didactic publication, a how-to guide to scansion, designed to give the reader the tools necessary to understand this method and how to apply it to verse. There are exercises dispersed throughout the book to help you grasp the practical application of each concept, and a helpful glossary and index at the back, as well as just enough theoretical information to justify the claims of the system without getting too in-depth on the philosophies of metre. The author has said elsewhere that this is less a scholarly book than a handbook for the student and the poet, but whatever level you are at with your prosody studies, it's still a very interesting read.

Great book! Very easy to follow and learn from. Exercises and examples are very useful.