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  • “Neither Out Far Nor in Deep”
  • William Harmon (bio)
A Poet’s Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry by Annie Finch (University of Michigan Press, 2012. 736 pages. $40 pb)
A Poet’s Ear: A Handbook of Meter and Form by Annie Finch (University of Michigan Press, 2013. 440 pages. $35 pb)

Annie Finch’s A Poet’s Craft was published in February 2012. Fifteen months later, most of the acoustic material in that book—after cutting, rearranging, pasting, and reinforcing—appeared as A Poet’s Ear. Although ostensibly reviewing A Poet’s Ear, I have to notice that A Poet’s Craft (736 pages, $40) is a better deal than A Poet’s Ear (440 pages, [End Page vi] $35). That is, for 60 percent of the earlier book you pay 87 percent of the price. Since $5 more gets you 300 more pages of material, you might as well buy the whole book.

Much in A Poet’s Craft carries over verbatim into A Poet’s Ear. You might even say too verbatim: the later book includes many errors and even some internal references without regard to change of context. The end of chapter 1 of A Poet’s Ear says, “For inspiration, look at Robinson Jeffers’s ‘Shine, Perishing Republic’ in chapter 1 or Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ in this chapter.” That is, the reader of chapter 1 is told to go to chapter 1, but “Shine, Perishing Republic” is nowhere in A Poet’s Ear. That sentence comes intact from chapter 15 of A Poet’s Craft; “Shine, Perishing Republic” is indeed in chapter 1 of that book. And at least one passage in A Poet’s Ear seems to refer to itself as A Poet’s Craft (p. 77).

A cursory check of A Poet’s Ear reveals that many of its errors repeat those found in A Poet’s Craft. Herbert’s “The Collar” bears the date 1585, eight years before Herbert’s birth. The first paeon, which should be represented as /uuu, shows up as “/uuuu.” “As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, / When they meet with an obstacle …” from the familiar Christmas poem is scanned as follows: “‘as dry leaves’ and ‘the wild hur-’ are bacchics. … ‘with an ob-’ is called a tribrach, the three-syllable equivalent to a pyrrhic.” Everybody I know says “with an ob-,” a clear anapest. (Incidentally, up through The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and The Poetic Self, 2005, Finch accepts Clement Moore as the author of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas”; thereafter she shifts allegiance to a Henry Livingston, Jr.) In a line from a Berryman sonnet, “an evening” becomes “and evening.” A sentence beginning “Or could be” ought to read “Or could it be.”

The argument that “medieval verse did not rhyme” is patently wrong, since even some Old English poems do indeed rhyme: one is called “The Rhyming Poem” or “The Rhymed Poem”; the bob-and-wheel stanza mixed long alliterative lines with short rhymed lines; Dante and Chaucer wrote thousands of rhymes. There was rhyme in medieval verse in most European languages, including even Latin (e.g., Carmina Burana). Outside Europe some Chinese poetry has rhymed from the earliest times.

Most names of poets seem correct, but A Poet’s Ear refers once each to “Edgar Allen Poe” and “Gerard Manly Hopkins.” Henry Howard, courtesy Earl of Surrey, is called “Sir Henry Howard.” The “brinded cow” in Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” becomes “brindled cow.” (“Brinded cow,” by the way, can be traced back to Dryden’s version of “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” and on back to Greene’s Menaphon.) Ezra Pound, we are told, “famously called Edgar Allan Poe a ‘jingle man.’” No comment. (Well, a little: Pound never said much about Poe. His anthology Confucius to Cummings has room for James Whitcomb Riley and even Melancthon Woolsey Stryker, but none for Poe.)

It makes sense that the 8:6 design of many sonnets matches the 4:3:4:3 design of the ballad measure or common measure. Finch cites Paul Oppenheimer’s explanation for the popularity of the sonnet by invoking...

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