YORK HANDBOOKS form a companion series to York Notes and are designed to meet the wider needs of students of English and related fields. Each volume is a compact study of a given subject area, written by an authority with experience in communicating the essential ideas to students at all levels. ENGLISH POETRY has two main aims as a Handbook. The first is to describe and explain the technical apsects of poetry - all those daunting features in poetry's armoury from metre, form, theme and imagery to the iamb, caesura, ictus and heptameter. The second is to show how these features have earned their place in the making of poetry and the way in which different eras have applied fresh techniques to achieve the effect desired. Thus, the effectiveness of poetic expression is shown to be closedly linked to the appropriateness of the tehcniques employed, and in this way the author hopes the reader will gain not only a better understanding of the value of poetic techniques, but also a better 'feel' for poetry as a whole.