The Book of Forms
The Book of Forms
A Handbook of Poetics, Fifth Edition
Now in its fifth edition, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics continues to be the go-to reference and guide for students, teachers, and critics. A companion for poets from novice to master, The Book of Forms has been called "the poet's bible" for more than fifty years. Filled with both common and rarely heard of forms and prosodies, Turco's engaging style and apt examples invite writers to try their hands at exploring forms in ways that challenge and enrich their work. Revised for today's poet, the fifth edition includes the classic rules of scansion and the useful Form-Finder Index alongside new examples of terms and prose that are essential to the study of all forms of poetry and verse. As Turco writes in the introduction, "It should go without saying that the more one knows how to do, the more one can do."
Lewis Turco is an emeritus professor and the founding director of the Program in Writing Arts at SUNY-Oswego and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. An award-winning author, Turco has published twenty-one collections of poetry and nonfiction, including The Book of Dialogue: How to Write Effective Conversation in Fiction, Screenplays, Drama, and Poetry and The Book of Literary Terms: The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, and Scholarship, Second Edition.
Acknowledgments
Foreword to the Fifth Edition
Part I. The Elements of Poetry
Introduction
The Typographical Level
The Sonic Level
The Sensory Level
The Ideational Level
Chapter Glossary
Part II. Form-Finder Index
Introduction
Specific Forms
General Forms
Part III. Traditional Verse Forms
Dramatic Poetry
Lyric Poetry
Narrative Poetry
Bibliography
A Chronology of Post-Modern Books Concerning Verse Forms
Author and Title Index
General Index
