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11 topics · 14 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Hyakunin Isshu
Fujiwara no Teika (compiler) · 1235
Anthologises one hundred classical Japanese waka by one hundred poets into a single sequence, fixing the courtly canon of Japanese lyric poetry and…
+3 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
A Defence of Poetry
Percy Bysshe Shelley · 1821
Argues poetry is the record of the best and happiest minds, and that poets — by expanding imaginative sympathy — are civilization's unacknowledged…
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day
George Saintsbury · 1906
Traces English versification from Anglo-Saxon accentual verse to the nineteenth century, arguing metre is best understood as an evolving historical…
+3 more at this level
12 of 14 works
Fujiwara no Teika (compiler)
Anthologises one hundred classical Japanese waka by one hundred poets into a single sequence, fixing the courtly canon of Japanese lyric poetry and later becoming the deck for the karuta card game.
link checked 17 Sept 2026William Shakespeare
154 sonnets that push the English three-quatrain-and-couplet form toward sustained argument and a volta-driven turn, addressed to a young man and a 'dark lady' whose identities the poems never resolve.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Walt Whitman
Abandons metre and rhyme for long, cataloguing, breath-length lines, arguing that American democratic experience demanded a new poetic form rather than inherited English convention.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Christina Rossetti
Uses an irregular, incantatory rhyme scheme in its title poem to tell a story of temptation and sisterly redemption that resists being fixed as either children's fable or erotic allegory.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Percy Bysshe Shelley
Argues poetry is the record of the best and happiest minds, and that poets — by expanding imaginative sympathy — are civilization's unacknowledged legislators, not the ornamental after-thought Peacock's essay had claimed.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ralph Waldo Emerson
Argues that a poem's form should grow organically from its meaning, since it is 'not metres, but metre-making argument that makes a poem' — a call for a new American poetics that Whitman later credited with prompting Leaves of Grass.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Edgar Allan Poe
Argues English verse is best analysed as equal musical time-intervals rather than through borrowed classical foot-scansion, an idiosyncratic theory dismissed by contemporaries but influential on later prosodists.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Elias Lönnrot (compiler)
Assembles Finnish oral folk poetry into a continuous national epic centred on the singer Väinämöinen, built entirely in trochaic tetrameter rather than the stress or quantitative metres of the Mediterranean epic tradition.
about 9 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Ezra Pound
Collects Pound's early Imagist and pre-Imagist lyrics built on his rule to present 'the image' directly and cut every word that does not serve it, founding a compression later poets treated as a default.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ezra Pound
Argues literature should be judged by three distinct kinds of verbal charge — sound, image and wordplay — and proposes a minimal reading list of works that actually advanced the art, dismissing most of the accepted canon as filler.
George Saintsbury
Traces English versification from Anglo-Saxon accentual verse to the nineteenth century, arguing metre is best understood as an evolving historical convention rather than a fixed classical system imposed on English.
link checked 17 Sept 2026T. S. Eliot
Fractures its five-part structure across shifting voices, languages and literary quotations to enact rather than describe a postwar civilisation's collapse into fragments, held together by allusion rather than narrative.
link checked 17 Sept 2026