Elements of Poetry

Poetry Unit Day 2

Poetic Elements Dealing with Word Choice

Rhyme

Imagery

Alliteration

Repetition

Tone

Mood

Rhyme

Repetition of sounds at the ends of words.

Poets use rhyme to lend a song-like quality to their verses and to emphasize certain words or ideas

Many poems contain end-rhymes or rhyming words at the ends of lines

Imagery

Words or phrases that appeal to one or more of the 5 senses

Writers use imagery to describe how their subjects look, sound, feel, taste, and smell

Poets often paint images, or word pictures, that also appeal to your senses

These pictures help you experience the poem fully

Alliteration

The repetition of initial consonant sounds

Writers use this to draw attention to certain words or ideas to imitate sounds and to create musical effects

Repetition

Use, more than once, of any element of language- A sound, word, phrase clause or sentence

Used in prose and poetry

Tone

Writer’s attitude toward his or her audience and subject

Often be described by an adjective such as formal or informal, serious or playful, bitter or ironic

Factors that contribute to the tone are word choice, sentence structure, line length, rhyme, rhythm, and repetition

Mood

Feeling created in the reader by a literary work or passage

Similar to tone

Organization of Poetry

Structure

Lines

Stanza

Couplet

Tercet

Quatrain

Stanza

Group of lines of poetry that are usually similar in length and pattern and are separated by spaces

Like a paragraph of poetry

It states and develops a single main idea

Couplet

Two lines of a verse usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit

Tercet

A set or group of three lines in a verse rhyming together or connected by rhyme with an adjacent tercet

Quatrain

A stanza of four lines; one having alternate rhymes

Types of Poetry

Formal Verse

Free Verse

Lyric Poetry

Narrative Poetry

Ballads

Epic Poetry

Dramatic Poetry

Formal Verse

Poetry that overtly uses the effects of meter, rhyme and form, especially the fixed forms (sonnets, villanelles etc.)

Free Verse

Poetry that is open to pattern and is recognized as nonconforming and rhyme-less verse.

Lyric Poetry

Highly musical verse that expresses the observations and feelings of a single speaker

Creates single unified impression

Narrative Poetry

Story told in verse

Narrative poems often have all the elements of short stories including characters, conflict, and plot

Ballads

A poem or song narrating a story in short stanzas.

Traditional ballads are typically of unknown authorship, having been passed on orally from one generation to the next as part of the folk culture.

Epic Poetry

Heroic poetry

Poetry celebrating the deeds of a hero

Dramatic Poetry

A verse or verses which are written to be spoken, usually by a character invented by the author himself.

As opposed to lyric and narrative poetry, dramatic poetry is narrated by the characters themselves.

The term is also used to refer to plays written in verse, such as most of Shakespeare's plays.