For those who may be interested: Google Books has some verse composition textbooks available for free (Latin and Greek).
J.A. Lupton’s Latin Elegiac Verse Composition
A. Sidgwick’s Greek Verse Composition
B.W. Beatson’s Greek Iambic Verse
H. Kynaston’s Greek Iambic Verse
I know someone who has used at least the first two in class with great success.
This little gem is possibly the best thing ever, and illuminating not just for verse composition, I mean just for understanding how the hexameter works: S.E. Winbolt, Latin Hexameter Verse: An Aid to Composition (London: Methuen, 1903):
http://bit.ly/bUybvC
Hi Eric, this is a topic of great interest to me also; you can find my “bookshelf” of GoogleBooks I’ve tagged for Latin verse composition here (I haven’t been flagging Greek comp, only Latin):
http://tinyurl.com/38mnebn
The titles are as follows:
Ainger: Clivus. Elementary exercises in Latin elegiac verse
Aler: Gradus ad Parnassum: sive, Novus synonymorum, epithetorum, versuum
Anthon: A system of Latin prosody and metre
Anthon: Elements of Latin prosody and metre
Arnold: A practical introduction to Latin verse composition
Bradley: Exercises in Latin prosody and versification
Brasse: Greek gradus, or, Greek, Latin, and English prosodial lexicon
Brunel: Parnasse latin moderne: Volume 1
Brunel: Parnasse latin moderne: Volume 2
Carey: Latin prosody made easy
Frost: A new Latin verse book, containing exercises
Gepp: Key to Progressive exercises in Latin elegiac verse
Gepp: Progressive exercises in Latin elegiac verse
Lupton: An introduction to Latin elegiac verse composition
Lupton: An introduction to Latin lyric verse composition
Noel: Gradus ad Parnassum: ou, Nouveau dictionnaire poétique
Penrose: Easy exercises in Latin elegiac verse
Penrose: Easy exercises in Latin elegiac verse. Key
Quicherat: Thesaurus poeticus linguae latinae:
Ramsay: A manual of Latin prosody
Rapier: An introduction to the composition of Latin verse
Raven: Key to Versiculi, a Latin elegiac verse book
Raven: Versiculi, a Latin elegiac verse book
Rouse: Demonstrations in Latin elegiac verse
Sharpe: Nomenclator poeticus: or, The quantities of all the proper names
Trinity: The master’s Latin verse book,
Uken: Steganometrographia
Walford: A series of progressive exercises in Latin elegiac verse
Winbolt: Latin hexameter verse: an aid to composition
Laura, several of those books seem to be dictionaries of the Gradus ad Parnassum type. Which is the best, do you think? I’d love to print one out and have it handy to check quantities when doing my podcasts. I know, I’m shackled to dead trees. Thanks for doing all that work collecting these titles!
Hi Chris, for checking quantities, I’ve been relying on the Glossa dictionary online; it sure is fast and easy to use.
For the big Gradus books, I’m not really sure which one is best – one of the things I want to do this summer (YEAH FOR SUMMER!) is to create a simple Latin prose composition course online (my school won’t let me teach Latin prose comp but I think I will create the course as a demo in hopes that they might change their mind) – anyway, in the process of creating that course I’ll be reviewing all these books that I’ve flagged looking for the ones to recommend to students. The nice man who’s editing that Vates journal, Mark Walker, said he would be interested in publishing a critical bibliography of Google Books there in that journal also, which will be a nice way for people to share their recommendations about good GoogleBooks to use for composition-related activities.
Just out of curiosity, do you offer Latin prose comp at your school? I am looking to create a course that emphasizes creating personal mottoes in Latin, and also retelling fables and myths, narrative prose rather than expository prose (the prose comp. courses I had in school were all expository, none of them did storytelling, which would definitely be my own preference). I’m curious what kind of prose comp. is going on (if any) at other schools.
The Internet Archive has a downloadable 1720 Gradus at
http://www.archive.org/details/gradusadparnassu00aler
The pdf is about 60MB (57MB in black-and-white).
Thanks for those lists, Eric and Laura. I rather like Anthon’s A System of Latin Prosody and Metre. He covers a great many metres, and his choices of English texts to be translated into Latin are quite interesting. I also like Rouse’s Demonstrations in Latin Elegiac Verse. It is very instructive and entertaining, though he makes translation into Latin elegiacs look easier than it is.
Laura, thank you for posting the names of these texts from Google Books. I’m now teaching Latin verse composition for the second time and while I’ve been content to use David Califf’s book, I’m open to other possibilities in the future and, besides, like to have these resources text-searchable on my machine in case they should prove useful when I go looking for an answer to some question.