Howells extolled Dunbar's dialect poems to the virtual exclusion of the poet's preferred verses in standard English, thus establishing a pattern of praise that haunted him.
I have always preferred verse-chorus-verse, with a smart bridge and some first-person lyrics to reel me in.
(Because of Pope's, and his precursor John Dryden's, efforts to wrangle ancient epics into their preferred shape, their verses were called "heroic").
That means more poems, haikus and sonnets than you can shake a stick at, with the ability to post feedback, save them to favourites lists, and get notified when a preferred poet has new verse available.
Among my favourite musical dissections of the human heart is the final verse of Bob Dylan's You're a Big Girl Now, which appears on his 1975 album Blood on the Tracks – though my preferred version is the rawer, rougher demo, which appears on 1985's Biograph collection.
One of the saddest truths in the bible is in the Gospel of John chapter 3 verse 19, "And this is the verdict, that light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil".
The preferred tempo on "Agaetis Byrjun" is largo, the lyrics are hymnlike and the compositions are built less on verse-and-refrain than on the careful accretion of tone colors.
The novelist, whose books include Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses, took to Twitter to vent his frustration, appealing directly to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to reinstate his preferred name.
* Preferred distribution.
The guitar is the preferred musical instrument; and, in a popular contest called the payada, two singers, each with a guitar, take turns improvising verses to the same tune.
