Contents
An important life choice you’ve made. Spring, summer, fall, or winter. Something most people see as ugly but which you see as beautiful.
The subject of a poem is the topic, or what the poem is literally about. Poets can write on any topic imaginable, as long as they make it appropriate for their audience. Common subjects for poetry include nature, growing up, growing old, children, and life events.
Try to incorporate your actual memories, personal reflections, or lived experiences into your poetry. Starting your poem off with something personal and unique to your own life will give your poetry a jolt of authenticity and specificity. Read your first line out loud.
This emphasis on repetition brings us back to our working definition of “literary theme.” Any given theme doesn’t have to appear in every poem in a poetry book. But it should recur often enough that you, the reader, notice its importance and sense the weight or emotive quality of that theme as you continue.
In poetry, a stanza is used to describe the main building block of a poem. It is a unit of poetry composed of lines that relate to a similar thought or topic—like a paragraph in prose or a verse in a song.
Some words that can describe the tone of a poem might be: serious, humorous, amused, angry, playful, cheerful, sad, gloomy, etc. Barren branches pierce the sky, Chattering in the shivering breeze.
The word stich, pronounced like “stick,” is the word that describes one line of poetry (plural is stichs, pronounced like “sticks”). The word verse can refer to one line of poetry as well, as in a poetic verse, but it can just as often refer to a poem in its entirety.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qap_5aHX1q4
Elements of a poem that invoke any of the five senses to create a set of mental images. Specifically, using vivid or figurative language to represent ideas, objects, or actions.
These elements may include, voice, diction, imagery, figures of speech, symbolism and allegory, syntax, sound, rhythm and meter, and structure.
The mood of a poem is the emotion evoked in the reader by the poem itself. Mood is often confused with tone, which is the speaker’s attitude toward…
Although a poem’s punctuation can take any form desired by the author, there are a few guidelines to help along those who are unsure. There are six basic forms of punctuation used in a poem: period, semicolon, comma, question mark, exclamation point and dash.
Poem structure – stanzas
In prose, ideas are usually grouped together in paragraphs. In poems, lines are often grouped together into what are called stanzas. Like paragraphs, stanzas are often used to organize ideas.
A poem or stanza with one line is called a monostich, one with two lines is a couplet; with three, tercet or triplet; four, quatrain. six, hexastich; seven, heptastich; eight, octave.
Definition: In poetry, the speaker is the voice behind the poem—the person we imagine to be saying the thing out loud. It’s important to note that the speaker is not the poet.
You might write a story with a tone that is hopeful or bleak, romantic or cynical. When describing an author’s tone in a novel, short story, or essay, you might use any of the following tone words in your analysis: sarcastic, solemn, fatalistic, nostalgic, dramatic, ardent, sullen, light-hearted or cheerful.
Just like fiction has a narrator, poetry has a speaker–someone who is the voice of the poem. Often times, the speaker is the poet. Other times, the speaker can take on the voice of a persona–the voice of someone else including animals and inanimate objects.
2 line stanzas are called Couplets. Couplets usually rhyme. A stanza in poetry is a group of lines usually separated by a blank line. Stanzas of 2 lines are called Couplets from the Old French word cople meaning two.
Free verse is the name given to poetry that doesn’t use any strict meter or rhyme scheme. Because it has no set meter, poems written in free verse can have lines of any length, from a single word to much longer.
The haiku is a Japanese poetic form that consists of three lines, with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. The haiku developed from the hokku, the opening three lines of a longer poem known as a tanka. The haiku became a separate form of poetry in the 17th century.
Italics are used for large works, names of vehicles, and movie and television show titles. Quotation marks are reserved for sections of works, like the titles of chapters, magazine articles, poems, and short stories.
Punctuation is a very personal thing in poetry and, I daresay, prose. … It’s not necessary in between or at the end of every single line, in most cases, and it’s even possible to write a poem without one punctuation point and still keep it effective.
Start by writing down all the words that come to mind when you think of your subject. Poets and writers often imagine what other people or objects see or feel. If a poet saw an apple, he may wonder why it is there, who put it there, what the apple is thinking, or what it will become, like applesauce or apple pie.