Have you ever wanted to lob a soft sonnet across an audience and have it be received seriously? Do you ever wish to squeeze your overwhelmed guts into words but worry they will buckle under the bulk? Do you wish you knew the difference between a sestina and a villanelle - casually but also like you were born with the knowledge?

Whether it is the act of creating or the act of having created, the need to express in a language outside of formal sentences and restrictive grammar has certainly appealed to me on more than one occasion.

If you seek to stoke that poetic fire or understand it better in others, look no further than this gentle, supportive guidance from the inimitable Stephen Fry (born August 24, 1957) on unlocking the "primal impulse" of poetry writing.

By gently belaboring technique, practice, and exercise, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, steers us confidently through an art form that appears far more daunting, even exclusive, than it is. (Hint: it's all about rhythm.)

Fry debunks the seemingly exclusive language of the poem:

When we want to describe anything technical in English we tend to use Greek. Logic, grammar, physics. mechanic, gynaecology, dynamics, economics, philosophy, therapy, astronomy, politics - Greek gave us all those words. The reservation of Greek for the technical allows us to use those other parts of English, the Latin, and especially the Anglo-Saxon, to describe more personal and immediate aspects of life and the world around us. Thus to be anaesthetised by trauma has a more technical, medical connotation than to be numb with shock...Metre can be reserved precisely to refer to the poetic technique of organising rhythm, while words like 'beat,' 'flow,' and 'pulse' can be freed up for less technical, more subjective, and personal uses.

Many wonderful books of poetry fill my shelves— these agents of pause and civility - but I usually collapse at their feet with disbelief that I will ever really "get" what they mean. With the help of Fry's superlative guide, I might begin to understand them. Or at least appreciate the difficult work and mind-grinding efforts that bore them.

American poet Mark Strand wrote "A poem encourages slowness, urges us to savor each word" in his study of poetry and poetic inventions. Fry agrees, "A poem can never be read too slowly."

And so, Fry seems to say, can our progress in understanding the poem. Be gentle on your poetry-writing self.

We have come to the end of our chapter on metrical modes. It is by no means complete. If you were (heaven forbid) to go no further with my book, I believe you would already be a much stronger and more confident poet for having read thus far.

Kensington Gardens, London. A place many poets and writers, like Graham Greene, T.S. Eliot, James Baldwin, Ezra Pound, and E. M. Barrie, have nudged along. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

In his memoir, The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography, Fry admits he is a born teacher. I would agree: his gift is dueling vulnerability and strength, intelligence and innocence, elitism and qualities of an every-man. 

I believe poetry is a primal impulse within us all. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it. I believe our poetic impulse is blocked by the false belief that poetry might, on the one hand, be academic and technical and on the other formless and random.

A poetic shout by George Orwell, written when he was eleven and published under his real name, Eric Blair. The poem was published on Oct 2, 1914, as a patriotic cry. © Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard.

Read Fry's lovely Ode Less Travelled to help understand how Robert Lowell's confessional poetry can be seen in the contemporary verse of Rupi Kaur and Ocean Vuong. Or how the immense longing and pain in Rimbaud's "A Season in Hell" might be revisited in the pulsing originality of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. 

Of course, many poignant, true things have been said about poetry in poetry itself. Like Wislawa Symborska's "In Fact Every Poem," which tells us "In fact every poem might be called "Moment." Indeed. Or Marianne Moore's "On Poetry," which has the delicious line "[On poetry] I too dislike it." Has there ever been anything so exacting?

I sometimes dislike poetry. I always dislike that I dislike poetry, or rather, cannot seem to penetrate it intellectually. Fry knowingly explains:

A large element of all art is constructed in the form of question and answer. The word for this is dialectic. In poetry this is a familiar structure:

Q: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
A: Thou are more lovely and more temperate.

It is common in rhetoric too:

Ask not what your country can do for you
But what you can do for your country.

There is a deep, instinctive property of so much human communication. In Greek drama and dance it was called strophe and antistrophe, in the liturgy of the Church is known as versicle and response.

One might suggest that this has something to do with the in-and-out pumping of the heart itself (systole and diastole) and the very breath of life (inhalation and exhalation).

John Keats' "Ode to Autumn," written during the poet's last great period of high productivity. Learn more.

In this replication of life, poetry can comfort as well as discomfort. About how many things can we say that? Fry tips the balance towards comfort by extending a warm hand and tremendous respect for the dignity and tradition of poetry.

I have already addressed the idea of rhyme as a connective, unifying force in poems, but it is worth considering the obvious point that rhyme uses language. Or is, I should say, exclusive to language. Paint can evoke landscape, sculpture the textures of physical form, but neither of these modes of expression has rhyme available to them (save in some metaphorical sense); music, like verse, can do rhythm but it is only poetry that can yoke words together in rhyme. Rhyme may not be a defining condition of poetry, but poetry is pretty much a defining condition of rhyme. If poets shun rhyme, they are closing themselves off from one of the few separate and special techniques available to them and that, in any estimation, is foolishly prodigal.

Treat yourself to the extraordinary rhyme and brilliant contemporariness in Ovid's The Art of Love, a 2,000-year-old cheeky, dating manual. Read poet Richard Hugo's wonderful essays on the triggering instinct and the emotional place of poetry that pair well with Fry's technical focus. I always return to Joy Harjo's admission in her memoirs of becoming a poet: "It was the spirit of poetry who reached out and found me as I stood there at the doorway between panic and love." If there was ever a reason for reading, writing, and applauding poetry, this is it. It shifts the unmovable, balms the unfixable, and expresses the unspeakable.