Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry

by Derek Attridge

The contemporary reader of English poetry is able to take pleasure in the sounds and movements of the English language in works written over the past eight centuries, and to find poems that convey powerful emotions and vivid images from this entire period. This book investigates the ways in which poets have exploited the resources of the language as a spoken medium - its characteristic rhythms, its phonetic qualities, its deployment of syntax - to write verse that continues to move and delight. The chapters in the first of the two parts examine a number of issues relating to poetic form: the resurgence of interest in formal questions in recent years, the role of syntactic phrasing in the operation of poetry, the function of rhyme, and the relation between sound and sense. The second part is concerned with rhythm and metre, explaining and demonstrating 'beat prosody' as a tool of poetic analysis, and discussing three major traditions in English versification: the free four-beat form used in much popular verse, the controlled power of the iambic pentameter, and the twentieth-century invention of free verse. All these topics are discussed by means of particular case studies, from the metrical form of a thirteenth-century lyric to uses of sound in recent poetry. Among the many poets whose work is considered are Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Keats, Tennyson, Hardy, Yeats, Frost, Ashbery, Hill, Plath, Paterson, and Prynne. Drawing on Derek Attridge's thirty-five years of engagement with the forms of poetry, this volume provides extensive evidence of the importance of close attention to the moving and sounding of language in the poems we enjoy.

Genres: Poetry

254 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2013

About the author

Derek Attridge is a South African-born British literary scholar celebrated for his influential contributions to English literature, particularly in literary theory, poetic form, modernist fiction, and South African writing. He is especially noted for his work on James Joyce and J.M. Coetzee, and for his landmark study The Singularity of Literature, which won the European Society for the Study of English Book Award and has been translated into multiple languages. Across his career, Attridge has explored the ethical, rhythmic, and linguistic dimensions of literature, always emphasizing the transformative potential of reading.
He has authored or edited over thirty books and published scores of essays in journals and collections. His major works include The Rhythms of English Poetry, which challenged traditional approaches to poetic meter; Joyce Effects and How to Read Joyce, key texts for modernist studies; and J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, which has become a foundational text in Coetzee scholarship. His book The Experience of Poetry traces the reception of poetry from Homer to Shakespeare, while Forms of Modernist Fiction offers an ambitious study of the modernist novel, earning recognition as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title.
Attridge has held numerous prestigious fellowships, including those from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, and research centers in the US, Europe, and South Africa. He has also held visiting professorships in universities across four continents. He is Emeritus Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York and a Fellow of the British Academy.
His editorial work includes influential volumes such as The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, Acts of Literature (featuring essays by Jacques Derrida), and The Cambridge History of South African Literature. His writing is known for its clarity, depth, and ability to bridge close reading with philosophical inquiry, establishing him as a key figure in the fields of poetics, modernism, and literary ethics.

Reviews

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

finally, a pretty good book in my recent run loosely grouped as poetic-theory... laser-focused on METRE, which Attridge did his PhD on so the expertise actually comes thru & is felt. Like when somebody with an obsession for trains talks about trains. keep it to yr specifics maybe, rather than wildly gesturing at a sweep like Davie or somesuch. cool stuff in here on the Dol'nik, KIND of a russian metrical feature, but as Attridge shows, it's everywhere in English, if unconsciously. His stuff on ghost-beats neat too. Favourite moment was the chapter throwing DP and Prynne against each other, seeing what would happen, and it goes remarkably well. best little reading of Don's mad scientist approach I've read anyway. lovely

[Theresa Eynon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book out of frustration with an online poetry course. They were teaching poetic rhythm using terms such as iambic pentameter. Which would have been all very well if the examples given had not had, quite often, four beat lines that, even with the best will in the world, could not be considered to plod along - / -/ - / - / - /.

Derek Attridge popped in, as Emeritus Professor and said something that gained my attention. While the rest of the course tutors seemed determined to force poems to conform to a terminology of iambs, trochees and so on, he mentioned ‘beat prosody’.

So I really bought this book for part 2 Rhythm and Metre. The other essays are interesting but the chapters that challenge the orthodoxy of past prosody really deserve a wider audience.