The Poetry Classroom - Poetry 101: Poetry Glossaries & Guides
A KEY TO POETIC FORMSIntroduction
This page describes what various accentual-syllabic forms LOOK like. The descriptions below say almost nothing about the significance of each form, and yet poets often choose a form not because of how it looks but because of where it originated and how it has been traditionally used. As with genre, the choice of a particular form automatically puts a poem in dialogue with others that have been written in the same form. Once you've identified the form of a poem, the following resources will help you understand how it contributes to the significance of the poem:
USEFUL TERMS FOR DESCRIBING POETRYThis is a list of terms for describing texts, with an emphasis on terms that apply specifically to poetry, that appear most frequently in literary criticism, or for which dictionary definitions tend to be un-enlightening. The list is intended as a quick-reference guide and is by no means exhaustive; similarly, the definitions given below aim for practical utility rather than completeness.
TERMS FOR DESCRIBING PROSODYThere are many different ways of describing the spoken cadences of verse. Various languages and poetic traditions listen for stress, vowel length, syllable count, or some combination of these three, and poets experiment with all of them. What follows below is an outline of the basics. The following terms describe the generally agreed-upon system for approximating, in writing, our speech rhythms. It is a reasonably efficient system, but it's important to remember that it's not perfect: there are far more subtle variations in speech rhythms than the simple binary of "stressed" and "unstressed" (or, in quantitative meters, "long" and "short") can register.
A CONCISE GLOSSARY OF POETIC GENRESWhereas a "form" defines the way a poem arranges sounds, rhythms, or its appearance on the page, "genre" is something like the poem's style. Many poetic genres have a long history, and new poems almost always seek to explore a new aspect of the traditional style and thus to redefine the genre in some way. The following list is a selection of the major genres of poetry.
