Rhyme and Reason

A Short History of British Poetry from the #1 bestselling author of The Etymologicon

Mark Forsyth

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781805465294
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Literature

'Enchanting' Stephen Fry
'Unconventional, surprising and provocative from the first page' Times Literary Supplement

Did you know:
- Lord Byron sold more books in a day than Jane Austen did in her lifetime
- During the First World War there were more women poets published than soldier poets
- A kitchen-maid became one of the most popular poets of the 18th century

Some people worry that they don't appreciate poetry; but English poetry wasn't written to be appreciated, it was written to be enjoyed. For six centuries people have been reading poetry for enjoyment - for fun, romance, religion and entertainment - and this is a book about those people.

Rhyme ### Reason takes you from a medieval accountant (called Chaucer) trying to entertain his lord, past a doomed love affair in the Tower of London, through adoring sonnets and notebooks filled with dirty poems, and into the heart of Byromania and the Victorian hearth, to help you understand why poetry has had such an enduring hold on the British psyche.

From the poems of housemaids to the rhymes of kings, it's the history of Britain through the poems that people read, recited and loved.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The First English Poem
• 2 For Engelonde’s Sake
• 3 The Fifteenth Century, Which Is Mainly Rubbish
• 4 Down on the Farm
• 5 The Early Tudors
• 6 Tottely Different
• 7 The Iambic Pentameter: An Interlude
• 8 Elizabethan Drama
• 9 Jacobean Theatre
• 10 Metaphysical Poetry
• 11 The Civil War and Commonwealth
• 12 The Restoration
• 13 The Epic
• 14 An Interlude Concerning the World
• 15 Heroic Couplets: The Truth in Twenty Syllables
• 16 Ossian and Others
• 17 Regency Poetry
• 18 Byromania
• 19 The Romantic Myth of the Romantic Movement
• 20 The Deification of William Wordsworth
• 21 Dramatic Victorians
• 22 Anapaests, Dactyls and Other Strange Feet
• 23 Uttered Nonsense
• 24 The Nineteenth-Century Ballad
• 25 Empire and England, England, England
• 26 War Poetry
• 27 New Things Under the Sun
• 28 Poetry Goes to School
• 29 Old-Fashioned Modernism
• 30 Moderner Modernism
• 31 A Valediction Requiring Mourning
• Postscript: The Other Fellow
• Acknowledgements
• Very, Very Select Bibliography