A Poetry Handbook. Mary Oliver.

This is a book that was meant for would-be poets, but it's filled with interesting observations and clear explanations of how poetry works.

As Amazon notes:

In clear, accessible prose, Oliver (winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for poetry) arms the reader with an understanding of the technical aspects of poetry writing. Her lessons on sound, line (length, meter, breaks), poetic forms (and lack thereof), tone, imagery, and revision are illustrated by a handful of wonderful poems (too bad Oliver was so modest as to not include her own). What could have been a dry account is infused throughout with Oliver's passion for her subject, which she describes as "a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind." One comes away from this volume feeling both empowered and daunted. Writing poetry is good, hard work.

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Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse. John Hollander.

Hollander is well-versed as a poet, and as a teacher. This handbook provides samples of all sorts of English verse forms and meters. There's a sonnet about sonnets, and a sestina about sestinas, for instance. It's clear, it's helpful and it's delightful for both poetry readers and poets.

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A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Richard A. Lanham.

Any rhetorical terms, figure, trope, or scheme, is presented in an alphabetical list of over 1,000 cross-referenced terms, with examples and definitions. A list of terms ordered by type, including patterns of language and logical fallacies makes finding the term when you've noticed the pattern simplicity itself.

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Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry: A Student's Guide . Isabel Rivers.

This book is invaluable for anyone trying to make since of Renaissance poetry and prose, especially poets of the sixteenth through seventeenth centuries, like Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Milton. Ms. Rivers:

• Provides an account of the main classical and Christian ideas, outlining their meaning, their origins and their transmission to the Renaissance;
• Illustrates the ways in which Renaissance poetry drew on classical and Christian ideas;
• Contains extracts from key classical and Christian texts and relates these to the extracts of the English poems which draw on them;
• Includes suggestions for further reading, and an invaluable bibliographical appendix.

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A Glossary of Literary Terms. M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Harpham.

This is a good book to have if you're an English major, or seriously interested in critical theory and literary history. It's more specialized than Harmon's Handbook in that Abrams concentrates a bit more on critical theory.

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Handbook to Literature. William Harmon.

This is broader in scope, and thicker in size than Abrams' Glossary. Less emphasis on literary and critical theory, more emphasis on short entries for specific terms and references.

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On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction. William Zinsser.

I've read an awful lot of these short guides about writing, and taught English and technical writing classes using Trimble, Williams, and Lanham, as well as Strunk and White. This is my favorite of all of them. Stunk and White is a bit simplistic; it really was meant for the freshman comp class. Williams' Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace is OK, but it's more light and mirrors than practical advice, and it terribly derivative. Lanham's Revising Prose, while practical, is both pompous and elitist in approach. Zinsser offers practical, understandable advice, and deals with a number of different kinds of writing.

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The Elements of Style. William Strunk and E. B. White.

This book was originally written for freshman comp students. It is still largely directed towards them, and while it's ok primer, it's not much more than a primer; it's not a usage manual, and it's not the last work on writing, style, or English grammar. All that said, it does what it sets out to do, and it doesn't suck.

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The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. American Heritage Editors.

This is the only dictionary with both usage notes on standard English, and an Appendix of Indo-European Roots. Make sure you're getting the Unabridged version; not the College edition. There's also a version of the dictionary that includes the complete hard cover dictionary, and a CD-ROM for Mac OS X and Windows with the complete dictionary, and audio pronunciations of every word.

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