Gerard Manley Hopkins observed that the ‘artificial part of poetry,perhaps we shall be right to say all artifice, reduces itself to the principleof parallelism’. His phrase catches well the sense in which words areheightened into poetry by organising language into expressive patterns(parallelisms): sounds into rhyme schemes, rhythms into metre, lines intostanzas; and so on. This chapter identifies, and attempts briefly tocharacterise, these common poetic building blocks that combine to create thedifferent poetic genres considered in the book’s subsequent chapters.

It must be emphasised from the outset that even where they draw on longstandingand widely used conventions, the descriptive categories required for such ataxonomy are on inspection nothing like as sturdy as the ‘buildingblocks’ metaphor implies. The very term for the study of verse formitself is a point of contention (although this book treats‘versification’ and ‘prosody’ as synonyms, there arearguments for distinguishing between them), and a similar contrariety,inconsistency and confusion over terms – the implications of which extendfar beyond mere semantics – seemingly attends every poetic feature andeffect. ‘I have read or invented twenty definitions ofRhythm and have adopted none of them’, complainedPaul Valéry: ‘If I merely stop to ask what aConsonant is, I begin to wonder’. Such vacillationand vertigo is understandable, even inevitable. More than this, it is welcome.Analysis of verse form invites ‘wonder’ in both senses of theword, and persistent uncertainty over even the most basic elements may helpfullydisturb critical complacency into aesthetic appreciation for what may be feltbeyond what can be classified. The definitions that follow are, then, allworking definitions as opposed to definitive categorisations; the approach ofthis chapter and the book is avowedly pragmatic: ‘to look for precisionin each class of things just so far as the nature of the subjectadmits’.