troubadours	prosody	miscellaneous

How many times have you heard nonsense like:

'Meaning is more important than grammar'
'Poetry comes from one's soul'
'Rhyming tethers one's expression'
'I write it because my analyst said it does me good'
'Yeah, I really dig pooms'
'A great poet? Bob Dylan'
'I like to feel, not to think'
?

The aim of this reference is to try to make you forget all this for a while, introducing you instead to the phonetic nature of poetry, and how it has been exploited in Western Europe in the Middle and Modern Ages. Once this is made clear, we'll get into the more the overarching principles that make poetry what it is (again, from a phonetic point of view; the Present Author has no intention to teach you what to write about), and look at works from the 20^th century, and to that ever-elusive entity, free verse.

Not all the techniques we'll cover have been used in English: however, we deem they could be; when they have, we shall try to provide you with English examples; when not, we are sorry to abuse your patience with not easily understood originals: we do agree with Robert Frost in defining poetry as 'that which is lost in translation'.
As a language, we have chosen British English, not out of snobbery or nationalism (neither of the authors is British), but because we think of it as the world's lingua franca: therefore, 'hooker' will be assumed to sound exactly like 'hookah', 'clerk' to rhyme with 'park', and most male readers to be wearing trousers.

Conventions