Still, it’s hard to stay cross with a teacher who can’t help but pun, who delights in bawdy jokes, and whose footnotes include: “If you already know your feet and think that this is really an amphibrach, a dactyl and two iambs, I’m afraid I shall have to kill you,” and “Presbyterians, as you may know although Milton probably did not, is an anagram of Britney Spears.”
While the comic relief is mostly welcome, Fry truly shines when ardently defending and explicating the virtues of form (though he is quick to state his admiration of free verse). Several times he points to his lack of serious scholarship; but some of his most poetic moments come while he is analyzing verse.
Linking H.D. Doolittle and Gerard Manley Hopkins, he points out that, while the poets differ in methodology, “you can feel the same striving to enter the identity of experience.” Describing a poem by E.E. Cummings, he writes that “what cummings has done is to create a mechanism whose moving parts are operated by the reader in the act of reading. A verbal sculpture, if you like, containing a potential energy which releases its kinetic force only at the moment of the reader’s engagement.”
These observations make The Ode Less Travelled something more than a solid and engaging how-to book. “Verse is one of our last stands against the instant and the infantile,” Fry writes in the introduction, and this book is his impassioned, worthy contribution to the cause.
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