As someone with scant formal training in the structural and technical aspects of poetry, I found this book both fascinating and frustrating. It wasn't until the very end that I finally accepted that Hass was offering a richly annotated reference work and not a true introductory guide to the subject of poetic form. Now that I'm over my disappointment, I'm.excited to go back and dip into those sections that intrigued me most, mining Hass' lists of exemplars and perhaps even taking up his challenge to diagram some poems. All of that newfound enthusiasm aside, as a reference work his book is missing some important components, namely an index (!) and a good glossary. The presence of those two items would have bumped my review up one star. ( )

I only skimmed the book over the course a few hours, so this is less a review than notes to myself for when I read it again. But read again I most certainly shall, because there is a lot to learn here. I originally saw it on a bookstore shelf and picked it up because, while I read and enjoy poetry, I've never actually studied it, so I thought this might help make up for my lack of college lit classes; I was not wrong.

The book sprang from the author's notes for a seminar for aspiring poets, and parts retain the feeling of notes, while other sections are fully written out. It covers the entire breadth of poetry in the English language, from medieval song through the 21st century. It brings in poetry of other languages where it has influenced or inspired poetry in English (the odes of Horace, Persian ghazals, Petrarchan sonnets and more), but it's definitely not about the poetry of the world. It includes poems and fragments from nearly 70 different poets, and suggests reading of many, many more.

I'd break the book down into four parts, each of which is several chapters, not always adjacent. One part considers lines of poetry, either alone or in groups of two to four, with observations about the relationships between grammatical structures and poetic ones, how stanzas of varying sizes have different effects, and some related forms, including haiku, couplets, blues, terza rima, and the ballad. A second part discusses structures such as the sonnet, ghazal, villanelle, as well as blank verse, what the author calls "difficult" forms, constructed or generated poetry, and that apparent contradiction, prose poetry. Another part explores poetic "genres", including odes, elegies, satires, etc., none of which are constrained either by meter of stanza structure. The final part comprises a few chapters about rhythm, stress, and scanning a poem, and "how free verse works".

I think when I come back to this I'll plan to spend a leisurely year with it, reading a chapter with pencil in hand, then going off to spend time with the suggested readings (or at least some of them). I know there are other books on poetic form out there (the author recommends a couple in his introduction), and I'll probably look them up too. What I got out of this first pass tells me that there's a lot more to get, and that it will give me the tools to deepen my understanding of, and appreciation for, both the poetry I've already read, and the poems I've yet to discover. ( )