Hennets

The Complete Horwich Hennets

The Complete Horwich Hennets is Edmond Wright's complete book of poems on his home town of Horwich.

The Hardy Hennets

Edmond Wright has written The Hardy Hennets, a set of poems on some poems of Thomas Hardy.

The Animal Hennets

The Animal Hennets

The Wave Hennets

The Wave Hennets

The Hiroshige Hennets: The 53 Stations of the Tokaido Road

The Hiroshige Hennets: The 53 Stations of the Tokaido Road

The Caspar David Friedrich Hennets

The Caspar David Friedrich Hennets

The Jester Hennets

(Available as a book; see publications list)

Note on the Hennet

A hennet consists of 12 lines, each always of 11 syllables (the 'hen' of the word 'hennets' comes from the Latin hendeca, meaning the number 11), the verse rhyming abacbcdedeff. It has developed into a generally four-beat line, with lines 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 12 most often beginning with two anapæsts [* * — ], and 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 beginning with two dactyls [— * *], although there are several variants since these poems were written over a considerable time. The form began with hendecasyllabics as usually defined, but, as Tennyson found, a form that applied to classical 'short-long' metrification was not easily transferred to an accentual system; strict hendecasyllabics, not used by me, follow the five-beat metrical pattern,

| [ (— —) or (* —) or (— *) ] | — * * | — * | — * | — * |

e.g. 'O you | chorus of | indo- | -lent re- | -viewers|'

[Tennyson]

I adopted it because I considered that the iambic pentameter, up to the twentieth century the favoured choice for poets writing in English, had been virtually worked out, in that whatever one did with it could not but sound derivative. Hendecasyllabics have been used extensively by Italian poets.

The name 'hennet' is a portmanteau-word blending 'hendecasyllabics' with 'sonnet', for, like a sonnet, the hennet sums up a poetic reflection in little.