Learning the Secrets of English Verse: The Keys to the Treasure Chest

This textbook teaches the writing of poetry by examining all the major verse forms and repeating stanza forms in English. It provides students with the tools to compose successful lines of poetry and focuses on meter (including free verse), rhythm, rhyme, and the many other tools a poet needs to create both music and meaningfulness in an artful poem. Presenting copious examples from strong poets of the past and present along with many recent student examples, all of which are scanned, each chapter offers lessons in poetic history and the practice of writing verse, along with giving students a structured opportunity to experiment writing in all the forms discussed.

In Part 1, Rothman and Spear begin at the beginning, with Anglo-Saxon Strong Stress Alliterative Meter and examine every major meter in English, up to and including the free verse forms of modern and contemporary poetry. Part 2 presents a close examination of stanza forms that moves from the simple to the complex, beginning with couplets and ending with the 14-line Eugene Onegin stanza. The goal of the book is to give students the essential skills to understand how any line of poetry in English may have been composed, the better to enjoy them and then also write their own: the keys to the treasure chest.

Rothman and Spear present a rigorous curriculum that teaches the craft of poetry through a systematic examination and practice of the major English meters and verse forms. Under their guidance, students hone their craft while studying the rich traditions and innovations of poets writing in English. Suitable for high school students and beyond. I studied with Rothman in graduate school and went through this course with additional scholarly material. This book will help students develop a keen ear for the music of the English language.-Teow Lim Goh, author of Islanders

David J. Rothman is an educator, a widely published poet, critic, editor and scholar, and has served as the leader of many arts and educational organizations. His most recent volume of poems, My Brother's Keeper (Lithic, 2019), was a Finalist for the Colorado Book Award. In 2018 he won a Pushcart Prize for the poem "Kernels," which originally appeared in The New Criterion. In 2017 he published Belle Turnbull: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades), co-edited with Jeffrey Villines. In addition to many other books, his poems, essays and scholarly work have appeared widely, in journals including Agni, Appalachia, Atlantic Monthly, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, Mountain Gazette, New Criterion, Poetry, Sewanee Review, Threepenny Review and scores of other newspapers, journals and books. He co-founded the Crested Butte Music Festival, was the founding Publisher and Editor of Conundrum Press (now an imprint of Bower House Books of Denver), served as Academic Dean and then Head of Crested Butte Academy (an independent school), and has served as Resident Poet with Colorado Public Radio and as Poet Laureate of Colorado's Western Slope (2017-'19). He has taught at many colleges and universities, including the University of Utah, the University of Colorado, New York University, and Zhejiang University (People's Republic of China). From 2014-'18 he served as Director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University, where he also directed the poetry concentration, edited the journal THINK, and served as director of the conference Writing the Rockies. He has also taught for many decades at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, where in 2012 he won the Beacon Award for excellence in teaching. He lives in Colorado and Utah.

Susan Delaney Spear retired in 2022 from a position as Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Colorado Christian University where she served as English Department Chair. Prior to that; she taught at Chatfield Senior High School for eight years. She earned an MFA in Poetry with an Emphasis on Verse Forms from Western Colorado University in 2012. From 2013 to 2019 she served as Managing Editor of THINK, a journal of poetry, essays, and reviews. Her poems have appeared in The New Criterion, The Christian Century, Academic Questions, Measure, First Things, The Anglican Theological Review and other print and on-line journals. Her two collections of poetry, Beyond All Bearing (2018) and On Earth...(2022) were published by Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock. She now lives in Tampa, Florida.