FORGOTTEN GROUND REGAINED
A POET'S GUIDE TO ALLITERATIVE VERSE (ISSN 2996-6353)
Edited by Paul D. Deane
Alliterative poetry uses alliteration -- repeating sounds at the start of a syllable -- to link the parts of a line. If you have watched (much less, read) The Lord of the Rings, you have heard quite a lot of alliterative verse (even if you didn't realize it.)
Most people know about famous medieval alliterative poems, such as Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Fewer people realize it shows up in famous operas, like Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungs, and that hundreds of modern poets have written at least some poems in the form. Alliterative verse is a lot more than most people realize. It's not using tonge twisters, like "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers". Alliterative verse has a powerfl rhythm, driven by the way the alliteration reinforces the strongest, most important content words in each line. It is easy to write natural-sounding alliterative verse in English. If anything, in a stress-based language lke English, alliteration is more natural than rhyme. It can be as natural sounding as free verse, and as musical as the most lyrical of traditional poems.
The contents of some of the sections could use extra description, as follows:
1. The "Authors" section provides links to published alliterative poets, whether published on this site of elsewhere on the web.
2. The "Resources" section provides information and links to resources for the would-be alliterative poet. It provides background information and how-to guides designed to make it easier for someone who hasn't written alliterative poetry before to write alliterative verse that sounds natural and works well in modern English.
3. The "Communities" section provides access to pages that focus on particular communities -- scholars, poets and writers, SF authors and Fans, members of the Society for Creative Anachronism and Tha Engliscan Gesithas, and people approaching alliteraitve verse from specifically Christian or Neopagan religious traditions. In each section, there are links to poems published on this site or elsewhere, but also links to blogs and social media where people have posted alliterative verse.
4. The "Archive" section provides access to aliterative poems that have specifically been published on Forgotten Ground Regained, organized by author.
5. The "Index" section provides access to alliterative poems that have specifically been published on Forgotten Ground Regained, organized by title
6. The "Sampler" section provides access to multiple thematic indexes of the alliterative poetry pubished on Forgotten Ground Regained, including the following: Styles and Themes, Noted Authors, Scenes, Settings, and Objects, Love, devotion, passion, and grief; Modern Life, Humor (Light Verse), Audio-Video poems, Epic and Narrative Poems, Riddles, Fantasy and Horror, The Anglo-Saxon, Viking, and Celtic Worlds, Arthurian Legend, The High Medeval World, The Classical, Alliterative; The Biblical, Alliterative.
7. The "Historical Texts section provides link libraries that will rapidly get you to historical alliterative verse that is available on the web in the original language, and often, to freely-accessible translations of alliterative poems into modern English alliterative verse.
Copyright © Paul D. Deane, 1999-2024. All rights reserved.
No part of this site may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.
Forgotten Ground Regained on Facebook.