"This is a guide to verse, to the formal structures which are a necessary condition of poetry, but not a sufficient one." p. 1

"Both verse and prose, then, are schematic domains. Literacy used to entail some ability to write in both modes, without any presumption of poetry in the in the execution of skill in the former." P. 2

"But it should be remembered that all poetry was originally oral. It was sung or chanted; poetic scheme and musical pattern coincided, or were sometimes identical." p. 4

"Iambic meter runs along like this:
Pentameters will have five syllables
More strongly stressed than other ones nearby -
ten syllables all told, perhaps eleven." p. 8

"Trochees simply tumble on and
Start with downbeats just like this one
(Sorry, 'iamb' is trochaic). p. 8

"The kind of sonnet form that Shakespeare wrote
- A poem of Love, or Time, in fourteen lines
Rhymed the...