Fixed stanza forms: click here

Sample sestinas

Sample sonnets

Sample villanelles

 

Form and Poetry


 

Patterns of Stress    Patterns of Sound    Free Verse    Spoken Word, Concrete, and New Media Forms

 

"Poetry" is an incredibly varied kind of language, and trying to define it is really difficult—not to mention possibly futile and finally unnecessary. Usually when we refer to "poetry," though, we're actually talking about a specific genre called lyric poetry.  Lyric poetry tends to be distinguished from other kinds of language by 1) its self-conscious or especially heightened attention to image, sound, rhythm, metaphor, and resonance, as well as to language per se; 2) its intuitive and associational logic; and 3) its heavy reliance on pattern.

 

Patterns in poetry also vary considerably, but usually involve free or fixed repetitions of stress, sound, word, line, or groups of lines (stanzas).  

Patterns of stress have often, in Western poetry, determined where lines start and stop.  These patterns take several forms: 1) accentual, 2) syllabic, and 3) accentual-syllabic.

 

1)      Accentual lines are determined/measured by number of STRESSES. Early English verse was heavily accentual and alliterative, and lines tended to be split into two half-lines of two heavy stresses each:

 

In a summer season      when soft was the sun

I shaped me in shrouds      as a shepherd I were

In habit as a hermit     unholy of works

Went wide in this world     wonders to hear

 

Notice in the lines above that each half-line has two heavily stressed syllables, and that each line is heavily alliterative—that is, certain consonants get obviously and noisily repeated in each line.  The effect tends to be a bit repetitious and unnuanced:  Bonk-bonk—pause.  Bonk-bonk—pause.  And so on.  The simplicity can be somewhat beautiful too, of course.

 

2)      Syllabic lines are determined/measured by number of  SYLLABLES.  One famous syllabic form is the haiku, a three-line poem whose line-syllable count is 5-7-5:

That pale butterfly
Dancing lightly on a branch:
Someone's old condom.

Syllabics are a bit odd when used in English, because English is a heavily stressed, Germanic language.  In other words, they aren’t really integral to the sound of English and don’t get heard or felt the way accents or stresses do.  They are more natural in non-Germanic languages which don’t rely nearly as much on stress for meaning (Romance languages, for example:  French, Spanish, Italian.)

 

3)      Accentual-syllabic lines are determined/measured by counting BOTH stresses AND syllables. 

 

 

 

Types of Feet

(patterned groupings of  stressed

and unstressed syllables)

 

One unstressed /one stressed  = iamb

One stressed/one unstressed = trochee

Two unstressed/one stressed = anapest

One stressed/two unstressed = dactyl   

(and so on)

 

 

 

 

 

Types of Meter

Three feet per line = trimester

Four feet per line = tetrameter

Five feet per line = pentameter

Six feet per line= sextameter  

Seven feet per line = septameter  

(and so on)

 

 

 

 

 

Types of Lines

A line with four anapestic feet = anapestic tetrameter

A line with three dactylic feet = dactylic trimester

A line with five iambic feet = iambic pentameter

A line with four iambic feet = iambic tetrameter

 (and so on)

Types of lines can in turn be grouped into types of stanzas with specific rhyme schemes.  For some traditional stanza forms, click here.

 

For samples of one of the more famous types of line in English—iambic pentameter—click here. You’ll notice from looking at, say, Robert Frost’s “Birches” that, even though a poem may have some lines strictly adhering to the meterical count, many lines fall out of the pattern.  That’s because strict adherence to any pattern can become monotonous and even silly-sounding.  Expressiveness and interest is usually achieved through establishing the pattern, and then skillfully breaking it.

 

Patterns of Sound

Lyric poems tend to be rich in sound patterns and echoes of many kinds. All of these patterns are sometimes just referred to as rhyme.

True Rhyme = middle vowel and final consonant sounds are identical (e.g. cat/hat). Or: final vowel sound, if there is no final consonant, are identical (e.g., bee/see).

Slant, Partial, or Near Rhyme = initial and/or final consonant sounds are the same, but the primary middle vowel sound is "slanted" or off (e.g. hat/heat; bee/bay).

Assonance = repetition of vowel sounds (e.g., "How sweet that Spring will soon be creeping into our seriously screaming brains and heal us.")

Alliteration = repetition of initial consonant sounds (e.g., "Can the cute clucking; it's cracking me up.")

Consonance = repetition of final consonant sounds (e.g., "Can the darn run; we won't win.")

Hard rhyme = the rhyming syllables are stressed (e.g., cat/hat)

Light rhyme = the rhyming syllables are followed by unstressed syllables (e.g., mumbling/fumbled)

End rhyme = words at the end of lines rhyme

Internal rhyme = words within lines rhyme

 

Free Verse

Poems written without strict or predetermined metrical, stanzaic, or sound patterns are said to be in "free verse" or "open form." This is something of a misnomer, however, because most free verse lyric poems are in fact heavily patterned. Their patterns of stresses, syllable count, vowel or consonant repetition etc. are simply less regular than poems written "in form," and these patterns are likely discovered or happened onto in the course of being written (rather than determined in advance).

The length of free verse lines is generally determined (if not actually measured or consciously chosen) in the following ways:

Spoken Word, Concrete, and New Media Forms

See UBU Web's excellent site  for great discussion and examples of concrete, sound, and visual poetry. Time permitting, we'll talk more about these forms in class.

Also time permitting: we'll discuss performed or spoken word poetry and slams.

 

 

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