Ad Fontes: Measure By Measure

On Teaching Versecraft

Image Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

This essay was originally presented at Think’s Critical Paths Symposium in 2023. Susan Delaney Spear provides a guide through the curriculum and pedagogy described in this essay in the textbook Learning the Secrets of English Verse: The Keys to the Treasure Chest, which she co-authored with David J. Rothman.

This essay will also appear in the Summer 2025 issue of New Verse Review. It is the third in a running series on metrical poetry. You can find the first two entries here:

James Matthew Wilson and J.V. Cunningham, “J.V. Cunningham’s Counter-Revolution”

Brian Brodeur, “A Gnat’s Horizon”

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The Common Core State Standards (corestandards.org. 2010) for the English Language Arts define what students should understand and be able to do by the end of each grade. They correspond to the skills needed for college and career readiness. All public-school teachers are expected to create lessons that will ensure their students meet the standards. For example: “L.7.1c. Place phrases and clauses within a sentence, recognizing and correcting misplaced and dangling modifiers” means that English teachers must teach phrases, clauses, and modifiers beginning in seventh grade. The standards are a scaffolded guide for what to teach, not how to teach. The standards for reading, writing, speaking, and listening increase in complexity each year. Reading and writing verse is a highly effective means to teach students to read more closely and to write more precisely, but the standards do not mention poetry as a stand-alone genre. While we teach the classical tools of rhetoric and composition, the study and writing of poetry has devolved into a scattershot of random classroom activities. Skim this mash-up list of classroom suggestions from the Poetry Society UK and Edutopia, a respected teacher website.

• Draw on students’ life experiences.

• Encourage students to close their eyes to imagine.

• Teach the importance of drafting.

• Use free writing exercises.

• Write your own poems and share them.

• Teach the terms of poetry [notice this does not say “practice writing”].

• Encourage students to be specific.

• Encourage students to put themselves in their poems.

• Create a school poem and ask each student to contribute one line.

• Give students a list of words and ask them to create a poem using those words.

• Encourage students to write in the voice of someone else—a parent, friend, or teacher.

• Hold poetry workshops where students discuss one another’s work.

• Have your students write short poems, put them in balloons, and set them free.

• Have students write a poem in the style of a particular poet.

However well-intentioned, these suggestions preclude the heart of the matter. Would a good teacher in any discipline, say social studies, geometry, or dance teach in this way? These activities emphasize classroom fun, students’ feelings, and a misunderstood sense of freedom.

When I taught high school English from 2002-2011, teachers introduced poems purely to discuss their meaning, and poetry pedagogy had been like that for decades. Except for a brief poetry unit during students’ ninth grade year, poems were absent or at best taught as an introduction to a novel, a short story, or a unit in a social studies’ classroom to enhance the theme of the main lesson. I used poems this way, too. The more poetry, the better. Right? But, the craft of poetry was rarely, if ever, discussed. The notable exception was the nod to iambic pentameter when reading Shakespeare, explained merely as ka-Thump ka-Thump ka-Thump ka-Thump ka-Thump.

English teachers, excellent ones, even those who love poetry, do not know how to teach the craft. I was one of them. To my knowledge, there are no required courses in a Secondary English Education Major concerning poetry pedagogy. Therefore, most English teachers do not fully understand meter and form. English literature textbooks include famous poems and list poetry terms in a glossary, and these may help teachers and students to identify a particular form and meter, but in no way are they sufficient to teach a student to write in verse because they do not provide a curriculum or a method. Teachers are left to flounder. The result is that English Language Arts classrooms have forfeited their role in teaching the pulse of poetry: measure.

Recently while traveling by airplane, I listened to a conversation among three passengers behind me: a mother, her young daughter, and another woman whom they had just met. The daughter prattled on and on about her cat, and I was digging in my bag for my earbuds when the girl said with song-like enthusiasm: When she was an itty, bitty, kitty…. Before she could finish the thought the two older women (and I) were laughing. The women could not have explained their laughter, and I couldn’t have explained mine either without reflection. The young girl had described her cat in a perfect line of trochaic pentameter that contained three rhyming words. Later that same day I listened as Dana Gioia explained the ability of poetry to cast a spell. The girl’s banal banter had suddenly cast a glittering feline spell. We were instantly charmed, not by the storied cat, but by the rhythm and rhyme of words. If I had turned around and congratulated the girl on her perfect line of trochaic pentameter that included three rhyming words, I would have spoiled the charm of the moment.

However, this is precisely what we must do in the classroom. Not spoil the pleasure of language—teach measure. This is the most direct way to let the English language with all her charms appear again and again. This morning I listened to Kevin Young, Poetry Editor of The New Yorker, and Vijay Seshadri, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, discuss Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Moon and the Yew Tree” on the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. Seshadri shared that he has read Plath’s work for many years and has realized that the spots that “dazzle” him are the spots where “he hears the music” of the language. The question is: Why does that require a moment of realization? Because for far too long, we have focused primarily on what poems mean rather than what they do or on how we can teach students the tools of writing them. Various names have been used for these tools—prosody, versification, form, but I will use the word versecraft.

Today, we muddle the difference between “poetry” and “verse.” We tend to conflate the terms. In his Defense of Poesy, though, Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586, remember him?) differentiates between verse and true poetry.

…I speak to show that it is not riming and versing that makes a poet—no more than a long gown makes an advocate, who, though he pleaded in armor, should be an advocate and no soldier—but it is that feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a poet by. Although indeed the senate of poets has chosen verse as their fittest raiment, meaning, as in matter they passed all in all, so in manner to go beyond them; not speaking, table-talk fashion, or like men in a dream, words as they chanceably fall from the mouth, but peizing [weighing—ed.] each syllable of each word by just proportion, according to the dignity of the subject.

Sidney argues that in addition to well-ordered words a true poem includes “delightful teaching” of virtue. (Nota bene: this also has fallen out of favor.) We cannot teach students to write poems so stunning in content and craft that they “make (our) whole bodies so cold that no fire will ever warm (us),” which is Emily Dickinson’s definition of poetry, but we can teach students to write verse. As Sidney says: “The senate of poets has chosen verse as their fittest raiment.” So, we teach students the tools of the craft. The rest is up to the students’ talent, hard work, and ultimately their aesthetic choices in service of their own craft.

Likewise, in A Poet’s Glossary (2014), Edward Hirsch defines poetry as: “an inexplicable (though not incomprehensible event in language through words.” Note the difference between Hirsch’s definition of poetry and his definition of verse: “a metrical composition.... the poet disturbs language, arranging words into lines, into rows, turning them over, turning them toward each other, shaping them into patterns. Metrical writing is a way of charging sound, of energizing syllables and marking words, of rhythmically marking time.” According to Hirsch’s definition, verse is easily identified, but poetry eludes definition. Again, the former is much more readily taught.

The line of demarcation between prose and verse is measure. Meter is inherent in verse but not in prose. A poet is a maker. A poet makes poems. The raw materials are syllables, words, lines, and for millennia, meter and rhyme. If we fail to teach the rudiments of measure, we deprive students of meter, arguably the most powerful tool of the poet’s craft. I once heard Ernest Hilbert remark that A.E. Stallings “is a fully weaponized poet.” We laugh. And yet, where would the poets of the ages be without measure in their arsenals?

In the 20^th and 21^st centuries, metrical verse has fallen far from favor. There are a few journals, like Think, Able Muse, and The Hudson Review and others which consider versecraft as important as content, but for the most part, poems for journals such as The Sun, as strong as they may be rhetorically, are selected for their content, and however delightful, they read as prose. My use of the word “prose” is not a value judgment, for who would ever say in a derogatory fashion that Leo Tolstoy or Cormac McCarthy “only” wrote “prose”?

To equip future creative writers, we must teach them the tools poets have used throughout the ages. All of them. In addition to teaching rhyme in all its forms, enjambment, line breaks, caesura, all figures of speech, and rhetorical devices, for art’s sake, we must not ignore measure. Terry Brogan (The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics) begins his long definition of poetry: “A poem is an instance of verbal art, a text set in verse, bound speech. More generally, a poem conveys heightened forms of perception, experience, meaning, or consciousness in heightened language, i.e. a heightened mode of discourse. Ends require means: to convey heightened consciousness requires heightened resources.” Measure is one fundamental means to the end of verbal art. Once the students have understood and practiced writing measured verse, their aesthetic sensibilities will be sharpened. They can then decide for themselves what best serves their craft.

Imagine: a music lesson with no explanation of time signatures, a drawing class with no study of line or form, a painting course with no instruction in color, a dance class with no basic steps or counting. Solid instruction in the arts always begins with the fundamentals. The art of poetry predates prose, literacy, and the printing press. For art’s sake, let’s travel back to the future, measure by measure. Ad fontes!

Most English teachers don’t need to be convinced of the importance of teaching metrics in the classroom, but their response is often “How?” Classroom teachers need both encouragement and guidance. I floundered around in the deep end for a few years myself before I studied meter in depth, beginning at Lighthouse Writers in Denver, then in the MFA Poetry Program at Western State University from 2010-2012. However, after many years of music lessons, I always knew counting was important, and I deeply regretted that my own early education did not include meter. So, I tried to bring it to my students.

“In medias res” is a great way to begin an epic, but not an effective strategy for teaching measure. My typical failure was to write the rudimentary scansion of a line of iambic pentameter on the whiteboard, then read a sonnet and ask the students to find the stresses. There were usually a few correct answers. But then…there were students who could not “hear” the stresses at all. They became frustrated and checked out. I spoke louder. I failed louder. Then there was always one bright student who asked, “What about this….” pointing to a headless line, a feminine ending, or a tri-syllabic substitution. I would explain as best I could, and the bright student would still be confused. The “in medias res” method was tilting at windmills.

Teaching students to write poetry requires a scaffolded curriculum and tried and true teaching methods. Here I offer a curriculum that begins at the beginning, literally, and a pedagogy that dismisses the popular “writers’ workshop.” These workshops are often no more than the blind leading the blind, and when students are honest, they will say they do not learn from them.

In 2010, through the Writers in the Schools Program, David Rothman visited Chatfield Senior High once a week. I invited him to present verse forms to students in three separate classes: freshmen honors English, Creative Writing, and AP English Language. Each week he presented a different form, in roughly the sequence they appeared in English: Anglo-Saxon Strong Stress Alliterative Meter, Ballad Meter, Classical Imitation such as sapphics and hendecasyllables, Iambic Tetrameter, Iambic Pentameter, Blank Verse, Triple Meters, Free Verse, Stanza Forms (three weeks), French and Italian Repeating Forms, finishing with The Sonnet. He introduced a brief history of the form and a poem. During the ensuing week, students wrote an exercise in the form. The weekly exercises were low stakes and presented to the students in that way. I would scan their exercises and add comments. When David returned the next week, he went over an exercise or two that I had commented upon, made copies of, and given to him and the students. The students did not earn the typical A, B, or C on these exercises. I marked their papers, circling mistakes in meter only, and recorded a check, check +, or check -. At the end of the semester, I averaged all the checks and assigned a number to figure into a percentage of their final grade. Each exercise was truly low stakes. All the exercises together comprised only a small portion of each student’s final grade. No one’s GPA suffered. The first epiphany was the value of teaching meter from its inception.

Think about it. In Anglo Saxon, the students had to identify three alliterating accents and one other accent, no counting syllables required. Their common mistakes were putting the accent on the wrong syllable of an alliterated word. (ex. Alliterating “transparent” with “tucked” when it is the “par” syllable in “transparent” that is accented.) This laid the groundwork for finding the lexical stressed syllables in lines. In Ballad Meter, the students had to recognize the accented syllables, but they still didn’t have to count the total number of syllables per line. The end-rhyme in this form tends to promote the accented syllables a slight bit more, helping the students hear the accents.

Imitations of Classical Meter is admittedly an outlier, as it was in history. More students struggled with this form. I helped them during the week by writing the abstract form on a piece of paper and asking them to fill the line with any words they could to fit the pattern. No exceptions! At this early stage, sense does not matter as much as developing the students’ sense of accented syllables in lines. Rejoice when a student matches words with the abstract metrical pattern. As one student wrote: “Love felt like lectures, lifeless, limpy noodles?” Well, alrighty then, I think you’ve got it. Perhaps not love, but a sapphic line.

Before we moved into actual accentual syllabics, we spent a week explaining the Robert Fitzgerald system of scansion. To this point we simply marked accents with a forward slash and S’s and U’s for stressed and unstressed in Classical Imitations. Scansion is the English class equivalent to the math class question: Do I have to show my work? Yes. Absolutely. It is imperative for students to scan the exemplar poems and their own work. These are the scales, arpeggios, and finger exercises of poetry. How does it seep into our systems? By careful attention to what previous artists have written.

The pathway into iambic tetrameter had been paved. And the transition was easy. Most students grew into hearing and counting accents and syllables with ease. I found this was the strategic time to explain headless lines and feminine endings. They were beginning to grasp the rhythms of English and the transitions from line to line. We celebrated their successes, but we also celebrated their mistakes. When I read through the students’ exercises, I found one or two that contained common mistakes among the entire class. When David went over the poem the next week in class, he discussed the “hot” issue. On other days, I reviewed the “mistake of the week.” I wrote a line on the board, and we brainstormed metrical solutions. Did I mention that the students were having fun? There was hard work and laughter. Well, one complained, but he’s now 30 with a Ph.D. in the medical field and still jokes with me on Facebook about poetry. No harm done.

The transition into iambic pentameter was a tad rougher than I thought for an unexpected reason. Their ears for meter were now tuned enough to hear when a line began to cave in, and after the relative ease of a four-foot line, they told me they struggled to write what they considered to be a “good” five-foot line. But they also had successes. Here are the first five lines of one student poem—“Soliloquy of Annabel Lee”:

          The sea, it washed upon my toes and legs
          As darkness crept and slithered down my spine.
          The cold of blankets not of wool but wind—
          The wind was not but breath—caressed my skin
          With death. The sun went down and I—I wept.

This student wrote a lovely blank verse exercise. We moved on into triple meter, and when one student said, “I don’t get it,” another responded, “Think Dr. Seuss.” We were off and running.

The move into stanza forms of various lines then became a deeper study of the rhythm of each line and how lines formed the stanzas. How different a tercet from a quatrain! The French and Italian repeating forms were easier to tackle when the students had already studied how verse in English had evolved from measuring stresses and alliteration to counting accents and syllables. This is the pedagogical revelation: teaching meter to the uninitiated is significantly more effective if taught as the meter and forms developed chronologically in English.

Teaching meter offered an insight into all writing pedagogy: the workshop model, touted as best practice by educators, does not work. Putting students into groups and telling them to critique each other’s poems or essays is effective only for the exceptionally advanced students. Far more effective is for the teacher to select several student drafts and go over them with the entire class. When the teacher explains the strengths and weaknesses of a piece of writing, the students can look at their own drafts with fresh understanding. Again, the focus must be on craft before content. As I used this whole group practice more and more, I learned to skim through the week’s exercises and select pieces that contained common mistakes. All the students learned from one another’s mistakes. I stressed the importance of mistakes. In verse, as in life, looking at mistakes is how we learn. Mistakes are a means of growth.

I taught verse in this manner for ten years at Colorado Christian University. To reduce anxiety in the classroom, I created a schedule. Each student knew which day his or her exercise would be critiqued. If there was time left over on a particular day, students would often ask if we could look at their draft too. When they understood that it was craft, not content, on which I was commenting, they were able to separate their feelings from their exercises and learn.

This worked so well in my creative writing class that I eventually carried it over into my composition courses. Likewise, I strategically selected several essay drafts according to the strengths and weaknesses of each class and looked at them with the group. If the class struggled to develop a strong thesis, I went over a strong and weak paper, making suggestions. I asked permission of the students ahead of time or blocked the names. I came to depend entirely on models rather than workshops.

Teachers often ask me what to do when students “push back” against studying meter. I front load the curriculum by explaining that we are studying verse which contains the fundamentals of poetry. I point out that everyone who studies a musical instrument plays scales, every runner puts in the miles, and on and on. Students understand, and it frees them from thinking that they must write like Shakespeare or share their deepest longings in their exercises.

Teachers without a background in verse may be reluctant. But they need not fear. With the proper materials and methods, they can guide the students and learn with them. At Chatfield Senior High, two other teachers were willing to do so. I dare say both teachers and their students had positive learning experiences.

Public school teachers also may have concerns about covering all the curriculum before students take state and national tests. When I devoted time to versecraft in my public high school classroom, parents and students alike expressed anxiety about future test scores. In fact, scores went up. Studying meter is nothing if it is not intense, sustained focus on language—precisely what students need to succeed on the language portions of these high-stakes tests.

So I am calling for courses about versecraft in the Secondary English Education major. I am calling for teaching meter in public and private schools alike. It is not merely a part of a classical education. I am calling for a curriculum that builds sequentially and a pedagogy that is teacher-driven and whole class centered. I am advocating for young students, who like me at that age, recognized the rhythm and burnished beauty of a poem, but had no idea where to begin.

Let’s begin at the beginning. Ad Fontes.

Susan Delaney Spear is the author of two collections of poetry: Beyond All Bearing and On Earth..., the 2025 American Legacy Book Award for poetry/religious. She is the co-author, with David J. Rothman, of Learning the Secrets of English Verse, a poetry textbook that teaches meter and form. She lives and writes in Tampa, Florida. You can find her at www.susandelaneyspear.com.