Elements of Poetry

Types of Poems:

 Lyric This is a broad category that simply means any poem that speaks about
thoughts, feelings, experiences or senses.
 Narrative This type of poem tells a story. A narrative poem usually has a
chronological structure.
 Dramatic This is a poem that includes other characters who speak.
 Epic This type of poem tells the story of a great event or series of events, like a war
or some large important historical happening.

Subcategories:

 Sonnet A poem that has very regular rhyme scheme and meter (structure of syllables
and rhymes)
 Free Verse A poem without regular rhyme scheme and/or meter. Free verse may or
may not contain rhymes.
 Haiku A Japanese poem consisting of three lines with specific numbers of syllables.
 Ode A poetic tribute to somebody or something.
 Elegy A tribute upon the occasion of somebody’s death.

Persona is the voice or character who is speaking the words of a poem. Sometimes the poem is
simply “spoken” by the author, but often, an author will create a character who “speaks” the poem.
This is called a persona. Unlike short stories, poems don’t have what we call a “narrator.”

Stanza is a grouping of lines set off by a space.

Figurative language is a form of language use in which the writers and speakers mean something
other than the literal meaning of their words. Two figures of speech that are particularly important for
poetry are simile and metaphor. A simile involves a comparison between unlike things using like or
as. For instance, “My love is like a red, red rose.” A metaphor is a comparison between essentially
unlike things without a word such as like or as. For example, “My love is a red, red rose.”
Synecdoche is a type of metaphor in which part of something is used to signify the whole, as when a
gossip is called a “wagging tongue.” Metonymy is a type of metaphor in which something closely
associated with a subject is substituted for it, such as saying the “silver screen” to mean motion
pictures. Personification is when non-human things are given human attributes.

Imagery is the concrete representation of a sense impression, feeling, or idea that triggers our
imaginative ere-enactment of a sensory experience. Images may be visual (something seen), aural
(something heard), tactile (something felt), olfactory (something smelled), or gustatory (something
tasted). Imagery may also refer to a pattern of related details in a poem. The picture that a writer
forms for you with words—kind of the picture you get in your head from a part of a poem.

Symbol is a literal object or item in a poem that contains many different meanings.
Rhyme is the repetition of identical or similar sounds in different words, most often at the ends of
lines. Rhyme is predominantly a function of sound rather than spelling; thus, words that end with the
same vowel sounds rhyme, for instance, day, prey, bouquet, weigh, and words with the same
consonant ending rhyme, for instance vain, rein, lane. The rhyme scheme of a poem describes the
pattern of its rhymes. End rhyme schemes are mapped out by noting patterns of rhyme with small
letters: the first rhyme sound is designated a, the second becomes b, the third c, and so on.
Types of Rhyme:
 End Rhyme This is when the word at the end of one line rhymes with other
end-of-line words
 Slant Rhyme or Half Rhyme This is when words almost but not quite rhyme
 Internal Rhyme This is when words within and among internal lines rhyme
with each other

Rhythm is the term used to refer to the recurrence of stressed and unstressed sounds in poetry. Poets
rely heavily on rhythm to express meaning and convey feeling. When a line has a pause at its end, it
is called an end-stopped line. Such pauses reflect normal speech patterns and are often marked by
punctuation. A line that ends without a pause and continues into the next line for its meaning is called
a run-on line or enjambment.

Meter is the term used to describe the length of lines and arrangement of syllables in a poem.

Alliteration is a repetition of the same consonant sounds in a sequence of words, usually at the
beginning of a word or stressed syllable: “descending dew drops;” “luscious lemons.” Alliteration is
based on the sounds of letters, rather than the spelling of words; for example, “keen” and “car”
alliterate, but “car” and “cite” do not.

Consonance is the repetition of similar consonant sounds in a sentence or line of poetry.

Assonance is the repetition of similar internal vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry, as in “I
rose and told him of my woe.”

Theme is the same as in any literary or artistic work: the main or major idea(s) within a work.

Tone conveys the speaker’s implied attitude toward the poem’s subject. Tone is an abstraction we
make from the details of a poem’s language: the use of meter and rhyme (or lack of them); the
inclusion of certain kinds of details and exclusion of other kinds; particular choices of words and
sentence pattern, or imagery and figurative language (diction). Another important element of tone is
the order of words in sentences, phrases, or clauses (syntax).