RHYME'S ROOMS

An invitation to the “quiet discipline of poetry.”

Poet, teacher, and novelist Leithauser, hoping to inspire his contemporaries to read more poetry, aims his thoughtful overview of prosody at general readers who may feel trepidation when encountering a poem. Unlike scholarly books that focus mostly on what a poem says, Leithauser is equally concerned with how a poem conveys meaning: the building blocks that make for its particular architecture. For readers’ edification, he appends to his analyses a glossary that defines many of the technical terms that he uses, from accentual-syllabic meter to trochee and anapest. Moreover, as examples of poetic forms and language, he includes children’s verse, light verse by writers such as Ogden Nash, and songs by pop lyricists such as Irving Berlin, Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, and Stephen Sondheim, which he thinks will resonate with a broad readership. Still, Leithauser’s close readings assume a fairly sophisticated familiarity with canonical poets and poetic styles. He considers in separate chapters basic forms and attributes of poetry—stanzas, enjambment, iambic pentameter and tetrameter—and rhymes: exact, unexpected, surprising, and the variation known as “rim rhyme,” “where consonants are held steady while internal vowels are shifted.” That type of rhyme, he notes, “opens to the poet a playground for fresh recreation.” Among a wide range of examples, Leithauser includes many of his favorite poets and specific poems. Including Conrad Aiken’s “Morning Song,” Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking,” and Amy Clampitt’s “The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews,” these personal connections give the volume a welcome intimacy. Poetry, Leithauser advises, requires readers to slow down, preferably to read aloud, and to be open to the idea that poems “frequently urge a change of life.” In contrast to W.H. Auden’s declaration that poetry “makes nothing happen,” Leithauser counters that poetry “insists that we read and reread and reeducate ourselves” in order to test our values and reset our moral compass.

A warm, well-considered celebration of a rich literary form.