Poetry: Versification:

The Principles and Practice of Writing Verse

Poetry Unit
English 1A
2010
What is a poem?
Take 2 minutes and jot down all the
elements that a work must include to be
considered a poem?
What is the length?
What is the point of view?
Etc.
A Poem
A poem is a composition written for
performance by the human voice.
Simultaneous engagement of eye and ear
What must your eye be attentive to? Your
ear?
What a poem says or means is the result of
how it is said.

My Papas Waltz
By Theodore Roethke
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mothers countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scarped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
Classification
Poetry can be classified into 3 broad
categories:
Epic: a long narrative poem, frequently
extending to several books or sections
John Miltons Paradise Lost
Homers The Odyssey
Classification
Dramatic: Poetry, monologue, or
dialogue, written in the voice of a
character assumed by the poet
Alfred Lord Tennysons Ulysses
Robert Brownings My Last Duchess
Classification
Lyric: originally, a song performed in
ancient Greece to the accompaniment of a
small harplike instrument called a lyre.
The term is now used for any fairly short
poem in the voice of a single speaker,
although that speaker may sometimes
quote others.
I in the poem is not necessarily the
author.
Rhythm
The sequence of syllables (stressed and
unstressed)
What we hear when we read the poem
aloud
Meter
If a poems rhythm is structured into a recurrence of
regular/approximately equal units, we call it meter
Accentual-syllabic meter: most common metrical system
in English poetry
Iambic: an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable
It was/ the best/ of times/ it was/ the worst/ of times
Trochaic: a stressed followed by an unstressed
syllable
London/ bridge is/ falling/ down

Meter
Anapestic: two unstressed syllables followed by a
stressed syllable
The Assyr/ ian came down/ like the wolf/ on the fold
Dactylic: a stressed syllable followed by two
unstressed syllables
Woman much/ missed, how you/ call to me, call to me
Meter
Spondaic: two successive syllables with
approximately equal strong stresses
Listen!/ you hear/ the grat/ in roar
Pyrrhic: two successive unstressed or lightly
stressed syllables

Meter: Line Lengths
Monometer: one foot
Diameter: two feet
Trimeter: three feet
Tetrameter: four feet
Pentameter: five feet
Hexameter: six feet
Heptameter: seven feet
Octameter: eight feet
Varying the Pattern of Poetry
An important factor in varying the pattern
of a poem is the placing of its pauses, or
caesurae
End stopped
Run-on lines
Enjambment: the thrust of the
incompleted sentence carries on over the
end of the verse line
Rhyme
End rhyme
Internal rhyme
Slant rhyme
Eye rhymes
Vowel rhyme (assonance)
Poetic Form
Blank Verse: unrhymed iambic
pentameters; standard meter for
Elizabethan poetic drama; no verse form is
closer to the natural rhythms of spoken
English
Couplet: two lines of verse, usually
coupled by rhyme
Tercet: a stanza of three lines linked with a
single rhyme
Poetic Form
Quatrain: a stanza of four lines, rhymed or
unrhymed
The Sonnet: a poem of fourteen iambic
pentameters linked by an intricate rhyme
scheme
Villanelle: a French verse; five tercets
rhyming aba followed by a quatrain
rhyming abaa