Poetry

Poetry should engage the senses and imagination. Poetry entertains and offers fresh insight.

Form or Genre

Poetry is usually divided into forms depending on the rhyme scheme and structure of the poem. There are many poetic forms to use: ballad, elegy, pastoral, sonnet, haiku, villanelle, imagist, blank verse, free verse, and more.

Sound

With the exception of free verse, most poetry includes some kind of rhyme scheme, giving poetry a musical quality.

When discussing sound, we talk not only of end rhyme, but also internal rhyme such as assonance (repetition of a vowel sound) and consonance (repetition of a consonant sound), and alliteration (repetition of a particular sound—includes both assonance and consonance), but also of meter.

Meter has two parts: the number of iambs or feet (two feet per iamb) and the number of iambs per line which create the meter.

Iambic (iamb) meter has two feet (iambs=two syllables) with unstressed followed by stressed syllables.

Trochaic (trochee) meter has two feet with stressed followed by unstressed syllables.

Spondaic (spondee) has two feet with stressed syllables.

Anapestic (anapest) has three feet with two unstressed followed by a stressed syllable.

Dactylic (dactyl) has three feet with stressed followed by two unstressed syllables.

After determining the meter of the poem, we then look at the number of feet (or iambs) per line.

Monometer (one foot), Dimeter (two feet), Trimeter, Tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, heptameter, Octameter, etc.

Iambic Pentameter is a popular meter which has 5 sets (penta) of iambs (two syllables) creating 10 syllables per line.

That time | of year | thou mayst | in me | behold

Imagery

Poetry, because it is short in the number of words, is concise. We achieve conciseness and exactness of language through the use of imagery (the use of the senses to describe things).

Theme

Poems usually have some specific theme. For example, the traditional haiku is usually about the seasons and nature. Some poems are about love or loss. Others are just meditations on people, places, or things.

Figures of Speech

Just as other imaginative writing includes the use of figurative language, poems also use this.

Context

What is the situation in which this poem was born or created? Often poems are written as a response to a situation, historical or personal. I bet you could find a number of poems about 9/11.