Probably the most common metre you will find in poems you study, such as Shakespearean sonnets, is iambic pentameter . It sounds complicated, but one iamb is just a weak-strong, or unstressed-stressed syllable combination (commonly described as being like the da-DUM of a heartbeat), and pentameter means five of them, like a pentagon has five sides – so iambic pentameter is just a line of five strong-weak beats, like this in Sonnet 104 : One thing poetry has in common with other kinds of literature is its use of literary devices. Poems, like other kinds of creative writing , often make use of allegories and other kinds of figurative language to communicate themes. Sound I love just about everything about this poem: the way it reads as childish and impishly dares you to dismiss it, the way it begs to be read aloud and ring in the ear; the sense of attention it gives to people falling deeply in love as their little town bustles around them, oblivious to their sad little romance. There’s a rhythm and musicality to this work — its construction of four-line stanzas in a consistent meter is deliberately song-like — in a way that’s liberating to read when you’re just starting to write. Words are worthless if they don’t make you feel, and any rule that gets in the way of that is one that might as well be thrown out. I marvel daily at the way we can conjure up sounds in our heads, as if by magic. Read a book that describes the clinks and crunches of a meal, recall what a loved one’s voice sounds like, or indulge in a song echoing somewhere in the cerebellum — you can hear it all. This is one of the things I love most about writing, the way it is heard and yet not; the way it is sound and motion and smell and color and also void. This is the music of the E.E. Cummings poem anyone lived in a pretty how town.

Repetition – repetition of a word or phrase, maybe even a whole stanza. This tends to give a rhythmic effect, like a chorus in a song. ‘ The Charge of the Light Brigade ’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson is about soldiers riding into a doomed battle; it uses repetition of several phrases to create a strong rhythm like hooves galloping, and repeats ‘ the six hundred ’ at the end of each stanza to remind you of the six hundred men who fought. In the poem, Coleridge follows the story of an old “Mariner”. The sailor visits a wedding and recounts the tale of a voyage he took many years before. Although the guest is initially uninterested, the mariner and his lyrical whim begin to captivate with the tension of icy Antarctic adventures and scenes of moral discord. Epic: a long narrative poem that tells the story of heroic deeds, normally accomplished by more-than-human characters. They show extreme courage and outshine their contemporaries in their bravery. Epic poems are the product of preliterate societies or those in which reading and writing were uncommon.Examples include: ‘ Paradise Lost’by John Milton, ‘ The Divine Comedy’by Dante Alighieri, and ‘The Metamorphoses’by Ovid. History: focuses on actual historical events. Can have elements of both tragedies and comedies. They were popularized by William Shakespeare. Ex. King John.

The spoken “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” opened the door for my love of poetry. I realized I needed to stop reading Shakespeare and go watch Shakespeare. I understood the fire of Maya Angelou after hearing her deliver “Still I Rise.” The New Yorker’s Poetry Podcast, which asks authors to read their works in the way they heard them in their heads, became a gateway. What a joy. Poems indulge the eyes, the ears, the nose, the mouth, the heart, and the mind, and it’s easy to forget that when reading them in a book. — Matt Patches “ Eye Mask ” (1992)

With poetry, going through the standard writing process can feel like a creativity killer. That doesn’t mean you should just sit down, scrawl out a poem, and call it a day. On the contrary, when you’re writing poetry, you might find that skipping one or more stages in the traditional writing process will help you be more creative. Form and structure: the use of enjambment close enjambment When a sentence runs on from one line to another in a poem without punctuation at the end of the line. in several lines suggests that the character’s life is unchanging and that her isolation is relentless. The use of listing in the third stanza also adds to this impression. The stanzas are regular, with four lines in each stanza, which could reflect her routine life, added to by the repeated reference to the kettle in the first and then the fourth stanza. In the first stanza, Atwood uses a simile, a type of figurative language , to create an initially pleasant image: a hook and eye closure, a small metal hook that neatly fits into an appropriately sized metal loop to fasten clothing. Then the second stanza juxtaposes this with a jarring image: a fish hook plunged into an eyeball. These images together, formatted as two stark sections separated by a break, express the poem’s uncomfortable, visceral theme. Types of poetic forms Comedy: light in tone, intended to make the audience laugh. They usually have a happy ending with offbeat characters doing absurd things. Comedy might be sarcastic, fantastical, or sentimental. Farceis a sub- genreof comedy. Ex. A Midsummer Night’s Dream.Nonfictional prose: includes biographiesand reports. It is based primarily in reality. There are many fewer imagined elements, if any. It is usually written to inform before entertain. These are dramatic and theatrical lines, setting up a fairly long poem filled with dark images and strange occurrences. It is a great representation of how poets achieve darker atmospheres in their work. Lay your sleeping head, my love …’: so begins this, one of the tenderest, and most honest and beautiful, love poems in all of twentieth-century literature. A poem is a piece of writing, usually using some kind of rhyme scheme or metrical pattern, that expresses a writer’s feelings (or the feelings of a persona). They can tell stories, record memories, express desire, and share information. The best poems are those that tap into the universality of human experience and appeal to a wide variety of readers. While today most poems are written without a set form, below, readers can explore a few formal possibilities.