Reddit mentions of The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

Indeed :-) A great book to learn about the difference, and poetry in general, is Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled . Also be sure to stop by at /r/poetry where I'm one of the mods.

While I genuinely appreciate the sentiment and the effort, I must ask if anyone else is underwhelmed by this? I don't mean to appear snobbish, but it seems like reddit is constantly in awe of anyone that can follow basic rhyme and metre. To my ears, this is like a lesser verse from a Hallmark greeting card.

Apologies to all, if I've offended.

Edit: To anyone who doesn't know much about poetry, I can highly recommend this book.

You're looking for stuff on the craft of writing, the giants of which you've already listed. Literary analysis doesn't teach craft directly, it's a critical and academic approach to understanding a book like a specimen of culture (in other words, go to university if you want to learn that bit!).

If you want to learn about poetry first read a lot of poetry and soak it in. Everything in the books is descended from the Romantics and Shakespeare, so read all those (flippant, sorry. But you do have a lot of reading ahead of you if you're serious about this) but unlike high school try not to see them in a vacuum - you get a lot more if you understand why they were writing, who for, what was on their mind (lit. analysis erk!). His sonnets, Shelley, Keats, Rossetti, Byron (I'd add Swinburne's 'Garden of Proserpine' because I'm an emo and cos he was a ginger who couldn't get his shit together either).

Meter is easy to learn! It's the rest of the tool kit that's hard. The best single book I've read on it, the one that got me, is Stephen Fry's https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ode-Less-Travelled-Unlocking-Within/dp/0099509342