'For Better for Verse': Learning Meter Interactively

There's been so much great poetry and book news this week that I'm struggling a little to keep up with it all! First off, an essay of mine has appeared in the newest issue of the online arts journal, Escape Into Life. I've admired the work of the editors and artists at EIL for some time, and it was exciting for me to get a chance to write for them. The essay has to do with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and with how literary mash-ups are a new form of literary criticism.

Too much poetry news is never a bad thing, but it does mean that choices have to be made about what makes it to the blog and what gets put off for another week. Today's post, however, was a no-brainer. A new tool from the University of Virginia Department of English, in partnership with their tech-savvy library, allows users to interactively assign traditional markers of meter to poetry. The interface, wryly called For Better for Verse, then checks your work to see if you've correctly assigned the stress, feet, meter, and rhyme. Screenshot after the jump:

What you see above is the partly-completed exercise for the first poem that 'For Better for Verse' offers. Down the left-hand side is a collapsible panel for filling in the rhyme pattern. You click above the words to add the symbols for stress, and on the words to add a line to divide the feet. Clicking on the corresponding symbols on the right allows you to check the various elements, and bring up the drop-down menu for describing the meter. The poems are sorted by title, difficulty, and type, and the selections span vast swaths of poetic history which creates a very full experience.

For someone who fondly remembers first becoming fascinated with the concept of meter and rhyme during sixth grade English, this tool is a delightful refresher of skills that every poet should have in the back of his or her mind. Though the UI could be a little more intuitive, the makers of this tool stepped up to the challenge of converting a traditional written practice to a virtual one with considerable skill, and the exhaustive glossary and help sections put all questions to rest. What's more, lightbulbs like the one you see in the screenshot lead to enlightening notes on the intricacies of the poem's meter.

This tool should quickly become beloved by all poetry enthusiasts, and for anyone who's ever though about writing a formal poem like a sonnet, it's an important and helpful resource.