Reviews

All The Fun's In How You Say A Thing: An Explanation Of Meter & Versification by Timothy Steele

josiahdegraaf's review against another edition

2.0

Not the greatest book on metrics. Steele seemed rather prone to go off into rabbit trails, and often used ten pages when only one was necessary. As an example of this, Steele dedicated a whole chapter to the concept of elision, where he basically spent the whole chapter showing how different poets used this technique in their writing. I suppose from a historical standpoint, this is interesting if you really like the poets, but it didn't teach me anything about elision that I couldn't have just learned from one or two pages of summary. And that's pretty much the problem that I had with most of this book. It used more examples and more pages than necessary to explain its different concepts. For those looking for an explanation for metrics, Alfred Corn's The Poem's Heartbeat is a more concise (and in my opinion better) look at this topic than this book was. As a result, I didn't gain much from this book that I hadn't already gained from Corn's book, and this one merely took up more pages.

Rating: 2 Stars (Rambling).