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The Book of Forms A Handbook of Poetics
Poetry, Literary Studies
160 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published April 23, 1968
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530 people want to read
About the author
Lewis Turco
82 books24 followersLewis Putnam Turco was an American poet, teacher, and writer of fiction and non-fiction. Turco was an advocate for Formalist poetry (or New Formalism) in the United States.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
December 20, 2018
What's the word pattern in a sestina? How many iambs are there in each line of a sonnet? What's the difference between a roundeau and a rondelet? This slender reference has all the answers for any poet who's looking to shake it up by experimenting with different forms. There's even a bibliography in the back should you want to track down some examples of acrostics, madrigals, and villanelles. My own copy is yellowed, tattered, well-used, and beloved.
December 20, 2016
"The Book of Forms" is a decidedly odd handbook of poetic forms. Both it's organization and it's chosen content seem remarkably idiosyncratic. Turco uses his own form of shorthand for diagramming forms that takes a bit of getting used to, and fairly uncommon forms like a medieval Welsh style will often be described at length, with a full example, while far more common forms will be relegated to a sub-example of another form. I honestly don't have much of a problem with either of those. Certainly, there are enough sonnets and rondels in the Western Canon that far more obscure things deserve some highlighting.
What concerns me more is the fact that there's a sort of non-stop editorializing that goes beyond the essays that isn't commonly held among poets that is presented as a widely held theory rather than Lewis Turco's own interpretation of the dividing line between "free verse" and "formal verse". There is also the odd selection of examples, which seems to be either examples from distant European history updated into modern English (somewhat), or poetry composed by Turco, his pseudonymous name "Wesli Court" or friends and colleagues of Turco's, including, quite jarringly, a couple of poems composed as odes to the author of the book by friends. There's actually very little canonical poetry used as examples, despite the plethora from history.
This perhaps wouldn't be such a problem if so many of those self-same examples didn't exemplify much of the criticism Formalism receives from poetic "modernists", namely that most Formalist poetry lacks much of anything new or interesting to say under all those well maintained iambs and alexandrines. Most of the poetic examples included sounded very nice spoken aloud... and were immediately forgettable. Better to have something that fudges the metre a bit and sticks with you rather than a perfect verse that's bland.
There's also very little on forms outside the Western European tradition, other than the usual discussion of Japanese poetry. While perhaps understandable to a certain extent, as English poetry used traditional Western forms far more than forms derived from other cultures, shouldn't a "Book of Forms" at least have a brief mention of longstanding forms of poetry from other literate cultures other than just Japan and a couple of forms from the Arabic tradition that have made it to English? I'm not saying that it has to be given equal coverage, but if the author is going to extensively include multitudes of near-extinct and obscure forms from Gaelic languages, then perhaps a page or so on poetic formalism in, say, Sanskrit or Classical Chinese, might be edifying, and more importantly, offer new vistas of poetic exploration and adaptation.
All in all, I wouldn't recommend this as a poet's main reference book. It's just too tendentious, too odd, too cosseted, too *academic*. It delivers analysis but much of it isn't very helpful or encouraging, and you keep wondering, where is the passion? Why write formal poetry at all, if all it is just exercises in showing technical mastery of the language and narrow historical consciousness? Yes, show us how the heart beats in its myriad forms, but give us reason to care that we should know it.
Still, for the experienced poet, it's probably worth keeping on the shelf. It's obvious that the book is a work decades in the making of research and practice of poetic forms. One can refer to it to try writing in various forms. The information is all there. It just fails to draw in any reader who is not Lewis Turco and people who are of like mind with him.
What concerns me more is the fact that there's a sort of non-stop editorializing that goes beyond the essays that isn't commonly held among poets that is presented as a widely held theory rather than Lewis Turco's own interpretation of the dividing line between "free verse" and "formal verse". There is also the odd selection of examples, which seems to be either examples from distant European history updated into modern English (somewhat), or poetry composed by Turco, his pseudonymous name "Wesli Court" or friends and colleagues of Turco's, including, quite jarringly, a couple of poems composed as odes to the author of the book by friends. There's actually very little canonical poetry used as examples, despite the plethora from history.
This perhaps wouldn't be such a problem if so many of those self-same examples didn't exemplify much of the criticism Formalism receives from poetic "modernists", namely that most Formalist poetry lacks much of anything new or interesting to say under all those well maintained iambs and alexandrines. Most of the poetic examples included sounded very nice spoken aloud... and were immediately forgettable. Better to have something that fudges the metre a bit and sticks with you rather than a perfect verse that's bland.
There's also very little on forms outside the Western European tradition, other than the usual discussion of Japanese poetry. While perhaps understandable to a certain extent, as English poetry used traditional Western forms far more than forms derived from other cultures, shouldn't a "Book of Forms" at least have a brief mention of longstanding forms of poetry from other literate cultures other than just Japan and a couple of forms from the Arabic tradition that have made it to English? I'm not saying that it has to be given equal coverage, but if the author is going to extensively include multitudes of near-extinct and obscure forms from Gaelic languages, then perhaps a page or so on poetic formalism in, say, Sanskrit or Classical Chinese, might be edifying, and more importantly, offer new vistas of poetic exploration and adaptation.
All in all, I wouldn't recommend this as a poet's main reference book. It's just too tendentious, too odd, too cosseted, too *academic*. It delivers analysis but much of it isn't very helpful or encouraging, and you keep wondering, where is the passion? Why write formal poetry at all, if all it is just exercises in showing technical mastery of the language and narrow historical consciousness? Yes, show us how the heart beats in its myriad forms, but give us reason to care that we should know it.
Still, for the experienced poet, it's probably worth keeping on the shelf. It's obvious that the book is a work decades in the making of research and practice of poetic forms. One can refer to it to try writing in various forms. The information is all there. It just fails to draw in any reader who is not Lewis Turco and people who are of like mind with him.
March 27, 2021
When poets ask me where they should start, I offer them Letters to a Young Poet for motivation, some modern and classic poems, and The Book of Forms. I sort of cobbled this book together from my experience as a freshman in college and have continued adding to it, but had I encountered it early from the advice of my older time traveling self, I would have told me, "Try every form in this book. And then do it again. And then do it once more. Then change subject matter and do it again."
There's also a free poetry resource page on my site:
http://lanceschaubert.org/free-stuff-...
There's also a free poetry resource page on my site:
http://lanceschaubert.org/free-stuff-...
June 5, 2014
Sure, it's a thorough compendium of poetic form, but the book too often seems more a chance for Turco to show off his erudition (as well as advance his rather suspect theories about what constitutes "verse" and "prose") than a particularly user-friendly reference work. It's occasionally kind of fun in a down-the-rabbit-hole sort of way, but it doesn't do that much as a go-to reference guide.
October 2, 2008
This is the book you want to take to the beach and open to any page, then write that form of poem. Unfortunately it is out of print, but copies are around...a must for any poet.
February 21, 2023
Reader, skip the introduction. Also skip everything else in Part I except for the sections on accentual and accentual-syllabic prosody. Definitely spare yourself the "Chapter Glossary" for Part I, which could have been written by Charles Kinbote (who would also appreciate the maddeningly recursive "Form-Finder Index"). Once you've done that, you will have a book you can mostly use.
Lewis Turco is the Samuel Alito of poetics, and I do not intend that to be a compliment. Particularly in his introduction, it seems as if his over-arching goal here (other than keeping this handbook in print by needlessly updating the editions, and telling us repeatedly that we can find some of the information we might be looking for in his companion volume) is to pose a theory of poetics that is as rigid, abstruse, and conservative as he can make it. At times, to make some notions fit his scheme, he just makes things up to support them--and sketches his own tendentious version of literary history in the process.
Such pseudo-scholarly narcissism is hardly worthy of the author of the sections on accentual and accentual-syllabic prosody, which are extremely useful. Turco is a stickler and he knows this material in extraordinary depth and detail. Any disagreements you may have with him on a particular point of prosody must be qualified by an acceptance of how much more right he probably is than you on all related points. He packs a lot of knowledge into a little more than 30 pages; part of me wishes he had devoted a whole book to prosody, but another part of me thinks these pages are plenty. There's also much of interest in Parts II and III, once you find a way to navigate them. His treatment of the standard forms is good, if sometimes a bit stifling, and I can enjoy browsing through all the poetic odds and ends he's collected. I just ignore the stuff that doesn't interest me--while noting how much he also ignores or shows himself to be ignorant about.
Most students of contemporary poetry will rightfully be put off by his frequently snide and dismissive tone about anything that isn't formalist in tooth and claw (not to mention the irrelevance of many of the "forms" he champions to the poetry they read and write). That the book remains popular and beloved owes as much, I think, to its useful aspects as it does to readers whose understanding of what poetry can be is as narrow as the author's.
Lewis Turco is the Samuel Alito of poetics, and I do not intend that to be a compliment. Particularly in his introduction, it seems as if his over-arching goal here (other than keeping this handbook in print by needlessly updating the editions, and telling us repeatedly that we can find some of the information we might be looking for in his companion volume) is to pose a theory of poetics that is as rigid, abstruse, and conservative as he can make it. At times, to make some notions fit his scheme, he just makes things up to support them--and sketches his own tendentious version of literary history in the process.
Such pseudo-scholarly narcissism is hardly worthy of the author of the sections on accentual and accentual-syllabic prosody, which are extremely useful. Turco is a stickler and he knows this material in extraordinary depth and detail. Any disagreements you may have with him on a particular point of prosody must be qualified by an acceptance of how much more right he probably is than you on all related points. He packs a lot of knowledge into a little more than 30 pages; part of me wishes he had devoted a whole book to prosody, but another part of me thinks these pages are plenty. There's also much of interest in Parts II and III, once you find a way to navigate them. His treatment of the standard forms is good, if sometimes a bit stifling, and I can enjoy browsing through all the poetic odds and ends he's collected. I just ignore the stuff that doesn't interest me--while noting how much he also ignores or shows himself to be ignorant about.
Most students of contemporary poetry will rightfully be put off by his frequently snide and dismissive tone about anything that isn't formalist in tooth and claw (not to mention the irrelevance of many of the "forms" he champions to the poetry they read and write). That the book remains popular and beloved owes as much, I think, to its useful aspects as it does to readers whose understanding of what poetry can be is as narrow as the author's.
January 24, 2020
I did not enjoy reading this. It is dry, dry, dry and technical.
However, if I forget what hypallage or zeugma mean, I know where to look them up.
And if I want to write in a particular form, I can look it up here for a definition, schematic, and example.
This is a really good reference book but is not an entertaining read it cover to cover book.
However, if I forget what hypallage or zeugma mean, I know where to look them up.
And if I want to write in a particular form, I can look it up here for a definition, schematic, and example.
This is a really good reference book but is not an entertaining read it cover to cover book.
October 27, 2018
Handy reference book and easy to navigate.
March 2, 2019
THIS is the book you want to learn and understand poetic forms!
November 3, 2020
Definitive technical guide to poetry.
April 11, 2022
Not so much of a “read,” but a great catalog of poetry forms to work through and challenge yourself.
July 4, 2022
A little eccentric, sure, but indispensable.
September 7, 2014
Although I did so, this book isn't intended to be read from cover to cover, but to be used as a handbook (thus the word "Handbook" in the subtitle). Definitely to be used by the poetically astute (of which group I am not). The poems that Turco include seem to lean towards adultery, drunkenness, and other debaucheries out of proportion to the aggregate of poetry in history. Still, The Book of Forms is a great addition to a literary study library.
December 28, 2023
Lew Turco was a friend, at one time my professor. A good guy…loved his murder mysteries! This tome is a comprehensive catalogue of the styles and structures around poetics, an absolute mist have for an aspiring writer, as it captures both the discipline of language with the forms of expression.
January 10, 2013
I suppose I should just leave this one in my currently-reading shelf. I am always picking it up and browsing.
August 9, 2008
If one is remotely interested about form in poetry, especially if one is writing poetry, this book is a must-have. Everything from sonnets to obscure forms can be found here.
April 21, 2009
An absolute necessity for any poet. The metric bible.
August 17, 2009
I've used this book since 1968. It has everything a poet needs.
November 17, 2009
A reference book for poets, no poet should be without.
February 11, 2010
This is the book if you really care about the craft of poetry. It is written by a poet for poets and it put scholarship side by side with sage advice.
May 10, 2010
Unendingly useful. Have had an older copy of this since my grad school days!
January 4, 2011
A must have.
March 6, 2016
Required reading for a poets. Loved this book so much. Very helpful. Highly recommended.
September 23, 2015
A nice guide to some forms, more a good reference. I like to flip to a random form and try to compose a poem following the definition
February 19, 2016
It was an excellent book because of its reference abilities that complemented my writing!
July 3, 2022
This is a great book to read. Keep it handy while writing poems. It has great references and will keep you on the right track.
Read
August 25, 2017A bit western-centric and conservative (in terms of what poetry is), but loved the exposure to the myriad forms that exist in this world. Gained a greater appreciation for the attention given to stress, syllable, and so on.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews