Do verse forms have ideologies? Stephen Duck's unwitting affirmation of the current socioeconomic order in "The Thresher's Labour" seems to imply that the heroic couplet has a necessary connection to ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...

Three poets, three books, each with its own rewards. In her latest volume, “The Seven Ages,” Louise Glueck pursues more directly than ever her poetics of the stark statement, the urgent question. “Why ...

Free verse rules at the U.S. Naval Academy, an unlikely proving ground for young poets finding their sea legs. For the past 20 summers, the academy’s creative writing journal Labyrinth has been the ...

Quatrains in English folk verse are governed by laws that regulate the patterns of truncation (nonfilling of metrical positions) at the ends of lines. Each truncation pattern (we claim 26) is adhered ...