Hier ein kleiner Text über Steven Frys sehr lesenswertes Buch „An Ode Less Travelled“, den ich mal für die Uni schreiben durfte.
Steven Fry’s pace is slow. Slow enough to be dangerously close to insulting. That is to say: just right. His seemingly effortless, undaunted approach to prosody, the art heretofore responsible for many a headache, makes you confident, his pace makes you feel at ease, the familiarity with which he tackles the topic makes you optimistic.
Steven – and I now refrain from using his last name deliberately; the tone of his lecture is that amicable – has managed to write an idiots’ book on prosody without allowing himself to capitulate to oversimplification. Not even to simple simplification, to be exact. He does not even think to reduce the prepossessing palace of prosody to a shoddy shack that resembles little more than prose, to the contrary: he literarily bombards the reader with the complete range, shoots every available gun, hurls any piece of rhyming debris in your direction, but, unlike other authors, does this in such a gallantly simple way that even I believe to have understood the ins and outs of versification.
Steve’s book, comprehensible even to an Arthur Figgis, steadily moulds the rules of verse and all the accompanying technical words (those ghastly things you had previously feared) into the reader’s head, and solidifies them with enjoyable exercises that he eloquently encourages, nay, requires him to complete. But not without setting a good example first – he readily provides the initially petrified reader with his own attempts with every hurdle he imposes, allowing no space to even anticipate embarrassment.
Thus, Stevey manages to evoke a feeling unknown to most classrooms, that feeling of a friendly learning ambience, the kind unique to the supreme teaching style of benevolent, great instructors as he. Verily, his good-natured mode of instructing the reader – which is not merely worth being applauded, but should furthermore serve as a role model to anyone in the teaching profession – leads to something quite special; the reader, or student, is no longer obliged to find the material painfully dry. Instead, the topic is moistened and, consequently, allows to greatly improve the efficacy of the sieve that is our brain. How cunningly executed, don’t you think?
I cannot choose but marvel at this monument of competence, rarely equalled in insight, never reached in didactic expertise, perfectly executed – even the cover design is only semi-horrid. Undoubtedly, Stevey-Baby’s book is absolutely great, utterly amazing, just so super; the nonpareil, the unrivalled, surely the most marvellous book ever to be written – by him, on poetry.
Kleiner Nachtrag: 1,0 – Yeah!
Haggis 