## Metadata - Author: [[Stephen Fry]] - Full Title: The Ode Less Travelled - Category: #books ## Highlights - Metre is the primary rhythm, the organised background against which the secondary rhythms of sense and feeling are played out. This is a crucial point. You may think that the idea of feeling and thought being subservient to metre is a loopy one. Why should poets build themselves a prison? If they’ve got something to say, why don’t they get on and say it in the most direct manner possible? Well, painters paint within a canvas and composers within a structure. It is often the feeling of the human spirit trying to break free of constrictions that gives art its power and its correspondence to our lives, hedged in as ours are by laws and restrictions imposed both from within and without. ([Location 605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000Q360EG&location=605)) - There will always be a tiny sense of visual or aural end-stopping at the end of a line no matter how much its sense runs on. ([Location 622](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000Q360EG&location=622)) - Doubt, assertion, reassurance, second thoughts, affirmation, question and answer, surprise and the unstable rhythms of thought and speech are some of the effects that can be achieved with these two simple devices, caesura and enjambment, within verse that still obeys the ‘rules’ of iambic pentameter. ([Location 671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000Q360EG&location=671)) - So here is a summary of the six new techniques we’ve learned to enrich the iambic pentameter. 1. End-stopping: how the sense, the thought, can end with the line. 2. Enjambment: how it can run through the end of a line. 3. Caesura: how a line can have a break, a breath, a pause, a gear change. 4. Weak endings: how you can end the line with an extra, weak syllable. 5. Trochaic substitution: how you can invert the iamb to make a trochee. 6. Pyrrhic substitution: how you can downgrade the beat of an interior (second, third or fourth) foot to turn it into a doubly weak or pyrrhic foot. ([Location 978](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000Q360EG&location=978)) - (hypermetric addition). ([Location 1185](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000Q360EG&location=1185)) - catalectic subtraction). ([Location 1186](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000Q360EG&location=1186))