Rules For The Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse

by Mary Oliver

"True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, / As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance," wrote Alexander Pope. "The dance," in the case of Oliver's brief and luminous book, refers to the interwoven pleasures of sound and sense to be found in some of the most celebrated and beautiful poems in the English language, from Shakespeare to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Robert Frost. With a poet's ear and a poet's grace of expression, Oliver shows what makes a metrical poem work - and enables readers, as only she can, to "enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure that intensify both the poem's narrative and its ideas."

Genres: Poetry, Writing, Nonfiction, Reference, Crafts, Essays, Literary Criticism

208 pages, Paperback

First published July 27, 1998

About the author

Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Ulysse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hi, my name is Ulysse and I’m a prosody addict.

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I do about 15 lines of iambic pentameter a day.

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I drop trochees.

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I inhale anapests.

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I snort sonnets.

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Every once in a while I'll knock myself out with a dose of dactylic hexameter.

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My end-rhymes are positively catalectic.

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My verses are full of assonance and alliteration.

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My vowels are muted and my consonants liquid.

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I put caesuras in forbidden places.

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My body is like a simile; my soul is a metaphor.

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I wake up with an epic headache.

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My life is an elegy written in a country churchyard.

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If I hadn’t hung out with Byron, Keats and Shelley as a kid, I might have been satisfied with a life of plain prose. Those boys were such a bad influence on me, especially Keats. And that glassy-eyed T.S.Eliot, always plying me with some allusion or other, was he ever bad news. Ezra Pound beat me up after school. Would I had never laid eyes on Emily Dickinson.

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Maybe I should have spent more time with Austen and Hemingway. They weren't into any of that poetical stuff. Their sentences were clean and comprehensible.

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But it’s too late now.

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I am practically a poet myself.

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I shall never enjoy a novel again.

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Prosody hath ruined my life.

[Cindy Rollins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had no idea this book existed until I was browsing the shelves at McKay's. O, happy chance. This is a short introduction (or review) of the rules of poetry and how or when we can break them. Hint: You have to be good at the rules before you get to break them. Lots of example poems, many of my favorites, which make the book even more delightful.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

A respected poet recommended this to me as a first dip into metrical poetry. Amazing! Although I have studied poetry for six years, I always avoided metrical poetry (both the reading and writing of it) because I'd had such bad, boring, or confusing experiences in high school. Oliver's book was a gentle way into the waters. Not only has my writing improved but I'm now reading for the first time the old poets--and enjoying them!

[Claudia Putnam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a perfectly fine and reasonably complete guide to the basics of versification. Most of these guides to reading and writing poetry are not very different from one another--I get the feeling that they're churned out as part of the publish or perish thing. This book in particular is not substantively different from Oliver's earlier A Poetry Handbook. It's just a bit expanded. If you're looking for a guide to reading poetry, you might as well start here.

[Spike Gomes · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hard to find books on how to write traditional metrical poetry. So far, all I've had in my library for years was Judson's Jerome's "The Poet's Handbook". Mary Oliver's "Rules for the Dance" is a welcome addition to my collection on the subject. If I were to say anything, they provide almost a yin and yang aspect to their approach to the subject that complements the other's style.

While Jerome is curmudgeonly and critical in his pedagogy, Oliver is bright and breezy. Jerome will break down the mechanics of a single poem to it's bare essentials at length, while Oliver will fly through multiple poems in several pages while giving a somewhat impressionistic thumbnail of the topic at hand. Jerome is meticulous in both detail and opinion, whereas Oliver leaves almost half the book to an anthology of poems for the reader to work out the scansion and other details by themselves as an exercise in reading and reciting.

I think both books would be really necessary to have. Jerome's book makes the process of writing metrical poetry seem like a tedious grind that needs clockwork precision and aesthetic senses honed by years of study and practice. To be honest, when I first got that volume years ago as a teenager, it made me lose hope of ever being able to write a decent sonnet myself without training under a master poet. Oliver's book made me want to write metrical poetry because she made it seem... well, like dancing. You can get the basics down quick enough, and there's room enough to stumble and fudge a bit without people noticing so long as you keep the core beat of the metre thumping in time. More than that, like dancing, it's fun to do even if you're a beginner.

That said, Jerome's book makes you understand how it all works and why writing poetry like it's been done for centuries is something culturally important. Oliver's style has such bare bones on the actual history and nuts and bolts details of form and style that a beginner is likely to wonder if there's any reason to write in this manner other than it sounds very pretty to read aloud.

Still, even as a stand alone volume, I have to say it would be better to have Oliver's book than none at all, or only a dry reference book of style examples alone. If you have no idea what metrical verse is, and you want to write it, this is the book to start with. It'll get you going in no time, and more importantly, it'll make you want to write metrical verse.

However, if you want to get *good* at writing metrical verse, and really understand it, then you should move on to other works after.

[☄ · Rating 5 out of 5]

build thee more stately mansions, o my soul!

i yell across the courtyard of mary oliver university, where i have just finished my last class on reading and writing metrical poetry. my voice echoes back and forth between the buildings, a few birds take flight from the trees. i clutch my books to my chest, scurrying homeward bound. there are sonnets to write, and villanelles, and alexandrines upon alexandrines bursting through the floodgates of my mind! what a professor, that mary oliver is!

[Joe Haack · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book convinced me that freedom and form are not mutually exclusive - something true in life as well as the poem. I love this book.

[Winnie Thornton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Helpful. Especially enjoyed that Mary Oliver, upon teaching a technique in poetry, frequently used that technique in her prose.

[April Lundquist · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who doesn't love Mary Oliver? My favorite gems from this:

“Every poem is a statement. Every poem is music— a determined, persuasive, reliable, enthusiastic and crafted music.”

“The poem is ever refreshed on new lips. No poem, therefore, is old. It may have historical niceties, but is it, empathetically, about things that are timeless.”

“Dancing is the art of moving in accord to a pattern. Good dancing is creating embellishment upon this pattern. Which is not a bad analogy with reading metrical verse. One sorts out the pattern, one relies on it, and relaxes from effort to pleasure, one begins to come upon and follow opportunities for counterpoint, flourishes, hesitations as well as certainties and repetitions. It is an eloquence that involves total imaginative involvement, both physical and mental.”

“Finally, do not humble your thoughts, their length or their complexity. Try to seem simple. But do not be simple.”

[Juli Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a thorough, yet concise, handbook for reading and writing metrical poetry. Aspects of meter, rhyme, and music are broken down into short, digestible chapters, with excellent in-text examples. Oliver's reading of metrical "irregularities" is fantastic, and her feel for the way form supports content leads to some insightful readings of well-loved poems.

My only complaint for this book is that I found the anthology section of this book somewhat lackluster; generally, Oliver tended toward the well known and conventional when curating this section, the the detriment of quality, I think. Why, for example, did she choose George Herbert's "The Flower" rather than his superior "Jordan II" or "Love III"? Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem" is another odd choice; was this poem, rather than any one of his delightful and metrically vigorous poems for children, chosen simply because it is solemn or serious? Why choose "God's Grandeur" over "Pied Beauty"? Why, in Heaven's name, include that dreadful Robert Burns poem?!

I would recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone who wanted to deepen their reading of metrical verse, but not without also leading the way toward a more exacting anthology.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written four years after she wrote A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver gave us this slim, focused, nimble guide focused just on metrical verse. Succinct and well exampled throughout its short text, it describes the rules simply and clearly. Above all Rules for the Dance is a pleasure to read and play with. The appendix includes an anthology of metrical poems cited in the text but not fully quoted. That too was deeply informative and sent me dancing through poems I’d not looked at since high school, as well as introducing me to some to which I was new. Rules for the Dance is also what a handbook should be—first and foremost, handy and obstacle-removing (isn’t confusion the most common obstacle?)

Though it is out of order of publication, a reverse move from the specific to the broad, I will read A Poetry Handbook next and take the benefit of reinforcement from what is repeated, allowing what is new to firm up the scaffolding of understanding. A superb teacher, Ms. Oliver is.

[Kristin Boldon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential. A great companion to Oliver's Poetry Handbook, perhaps even more accessible, though it focuses only on metrical poetry. Great set of poems at the end, too.

[Ben Palpant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Concise. Accessible. Even, in places, lovely.

“Emotion does not elicit feeling. Style elicits feeling.”

“Always remember that the thing you love is language, poetry, it’s motion, it’s good news...And what you do not care about very much is yourself as the poet. And therefore it is the process that is important, and the body of literature entire, and how it changes us from mere humans into meditative beings. Modesty will give you vigor. It keeps open the gates of prayer, through which the mystery of the poem streams, on its search for form.”

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

For some reason, this book deeply influenced my philosophy and theology of art making. And it opened poetry to me.

[Michael Gossett · Rating 2 out of 5]

If I want rules for poetry, I don't want them from Mary Oliver.

[Christine Norvell · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much better than a long-winded, overdone textbook, Oliver's handbook is just that. It was a balanced measure of instruction, examples, and inspiration perfect for teachers, students, and especially self-learners.

[Nathan Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading a poetry handbook was a little bit of a stretch for me and was a little technical at times but it definitely broadened and enhanced my enjoyment of poetry. The first half of the book describes how metrical poetry works while the second half contains an anthology of poems. Here, Oliver’s concern is not to unlock the meaning or content of the poem but to understand it’s parts.

As with all anthologies, some poems were delightful while others landed with a dud. I’m sure the problem is with this reader.

Some new favorites: Annabel Lee (Poe)!, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (Frost), A Thing of Beauty (Keats) & Moriturus (Millay).

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short and pleasant book about the how, the way, and the what of metrical poetry. I have not read many of Oliver's poems, but I did recently buy Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, so I'm looking forward to familiarizing myself with her work. I prefer metered poetry to free verse, and much of this was a review of how metrical poetry is written. I find I enjoying reading poetry in the spring, so I'm jumping right in as the final snows melt and the world begins to green again.

[Maria Copeland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brief, but should hopefully be very helpful for teaching meter + scansion

[Swanny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Mary Oliver. She's a little loosey goosier than I typically want in poetry instruction, but I really enjoyed reading regardless. Good selection of poems to study inside.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rules for the Dance is poet/professor Mary Oliver's fine "handbook" for writing and reading metrical verse. It reminds me of Strunk and White's Elements of Style and Zinsser's On Writing Well--it's just as good and just as practical; in fact, it is more artfully written as it draws out the subtle values and effects embedded in metrical verse.

Oliver acknowledges that metrical verse is largely a poetry of the past but she makes a strong case for understanding work that extended, after all, from Virgil to Robert Frost and included Shakespeare, Keats, and Poe. As for encouraging the writing of metrical verse, her case is a bit less strong. Her broader argument about where poetry comes from (largely but not entirely from unconscious registers of reality) and how it is written (with discipline, on a schedule) makes more sense.

"Free verse" is how poetry has been written for many decades now, although the art of the strong beat, the occasional use of masculine and feminine rhymes, the impact of long lines versus short lines, etc. (all developed within traditional English-language prosody) are good to know. There's nothing in this handbook that can't be exported from metrical verse to non-metrical verse.

The odd thing about reading this study is that it takes one back to 9th, 10th and 11th grade when the ornate rhetorical flourishes and diction employed by the likes of Shelley and Wordsworth were used to ruin one's interest in poetry almost entirely. You know the gig: hidden meanings and bursts of the sublime and all that.

I don't know that reading Mary Oliver's handbook will breathe life into poems long ago slain by being forced on school kids too young to appreciate them (or relate to them), but this is an interesting sojourn in the shadowy forest of poetic formalities.

[Peter Buckingham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Colloquial and excellent.

[Literary Mama]

Rules for the Dance is a thorough, yet concise, handbook for reading and writing metrical poetry. Aspects of meter, rhyme, and music are broken down into short, digestible chapters with excellent in-text examples. Oliver's reading of metrical 'irregularities' is fantastic, and her feel for the way form supports content leads to some insightful readings of well-loved poems. The book anthologizes many well-loved metrical poems as well, although at times I thought Oliver's choice of poems was a little odd. Why, for example, did she choose George Herbert's 'The Flower' rather than his superior 'Jordan II' or 'Love III?' Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Requiem' is another strange choice; was this poem, rather than any one of his delightful and metrically vigorous poems for children, chosen simply because of the solemn subject matter? Despite some of these questionable editorial choices, the anthology does collect some excellent examples of meter in the English language, and Oliver employs these poems skillfully within her own prose. I would recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone who wanted to deepen their reading of metrical verse, but not without also leading the way toward a more exacting anthology.

For more recommendations on craft books, visit Literary Mama's Essential Reading List for September: http://www.literarymama.com/litreflec...

[Philip Gordon · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very simplistic, but explanatory enough text for people who need to grasp the concept of meter and rhythm in poetry. Very oriented towards beginners, however, and I found the sort of breathless amazement at some instances of formal verse a bit overblown. The collection of poems at the books end fell mostly flat for me, but still a fine example for those who need it.

[Sally · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book about metrical poetry, covering structures and forms and terms. She gives good examples and the book has a lovely section at the end with a variety of poems.

[Randy Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book seems like a sequel to her 'A Poetry Handbook,' except here the focus is exclusively on metric verse. In her handbook Mary Oliver makes clear that a baseline understanding and appreciation for metric verse is essential for writing poetry that today has mostly abandoned the rhyme. Personally, I love poetry that rhymes. It sets up a series of sensation inside me that creates delight, surprise and at its best insight.

As a layperson coming late to the poetry game, rhyme is what I think of with metric verse but Oliver makes it clear in this short, wise and wonderful book that there is so much more to it than that. One of the key things is simply that this kind of poetry in particular should be read out loud. That is where the true beauty and enjoyment is found. That means breath, line length, silence, alliteration and assonance become so important.

Half the book are poems that Oliver reference in her text and then gives us a chance to read (out loud) for ourselves to pleasure in the pure cascade of beautiful sounds. There is more to poetry than sound. There is imagery, meaning and insight and all the rest but for me know it is the sound that I glory in the most.

[Cate Tedford]

Absolute GOAT, queen of all queens, lords of lords, Jesus Christ herself—MO. She’s brilliant and she’s witty and I’m forever in awe of her writing—even in the form of an instructional guide to reading and writing metrical verse!! But truly, she’s incredibly well read, and I learn much about the greats from her writing and instruction. This book was a lovely review in many ways while also packed with new bits of information and wisdom. Inspiring me to write again! With keen attention to traditional form, that is.

I’ve now officially read every MO book available on the market. And will hopefully read each four more times in my life!

“Poetry, imaginatively, takes place within the world. It does not take place on a sheet of paper.”

“What is poetry but, through whatever particular instance seems believably to be occurring, a meditation upon something more general and more profound?”

“… the greatest literature does not strive to be literature. All elements of the poem—meter, sound, sense, and style—are there only to make what is written more reasonable, passionate, and effective.

Orpheus, who did not even seem to think, only to sing, is the ultimate poet.”

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mary Oliver once called poetry a conversation between the heart and the mind. I think there's such a lovely balance of that in this little volume: enough mind to teach anyone the basics of metered poetry, but enough heart to appeal to true poets. For, as Oliver also says, "everyone knows that poets are born and not made in school."
If you're well-versed in poetry, this book will still teach you many things you may not know. Oliver uses well-known and lesser-known works to explain the main tenets of metered verse. What I so love is, the last third of the book is an anthology of poems that Oliver collected herself, which is why reading this book took so long; I like to read one or two poems every day and then reread them before moving on to the next.
All writers should have a copy of this book, and especially all poets.

[abhishek Chakraborty · Rating 5 out of 5]

English is not my first language , and through out all these years I have been missing out everything great about poems : the intonation , the rise and fall of accents , and the overall 'Dance' . The Shakespearen Sonnets which were read by my professors during college , all wrong ,they strangled the pentameter ,mangled the Alexandrine, boot the tetrameter , . But this short book by Mary Oliver put me straight into the universe of sounds and patterns and structures along with little twists and turns. Metrical poem, a rarity, in current world of free verse , loose patterns and no-patterns , eligiac , as it may sound , this book gives a fascinating account of poems of past , the Genesis of the art of metrical poetry .

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps the first book to give both a solid foray into the techniques of poetry, as well as explain the heart and soul of rhythm and meter, Oliver's work provided the first foundations to my study of poetry. Although sometimes explanations still took time to grasp, or felt just out of reach, I feel some of this is simply due to the fact that words read lose the inherent cadence of words said, and to understand the natural rhythm of speech and apply it in writing is an art so subtle that it is hard to relearn as an adult. All in all, a great read, and I'm very excited for future foray's into the art of poetry.