Haiku poetry | Home | Literature | Fiction | Nonfiction | Drama
Outstanding Poetry Books for the College Bound Student (from the American Library Association)
"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings:
it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquility."
Williams Wordsworth

Elements of Poetry

Poets use literary techniques to make their language beautiful and interesting.

Types of Poetry:
    Narrative poems tell stories.
    Lyric poems tell the emotions of a speaker and do not tell a story.

Poetic techniques

1. Techniques of shape:
    a. concrete poems -- when a poet places words on a page in a shape that imitates his or her subject.
    b. stanzas -- groups of lines into which a poem is divided. A stanza usually deals with a single idea.
    c. couplet - a two-line stanza
    d. tercet - a three-line stanza
    e. quatrain - a four-line stanza


2. Techniques of sound:
    a. Rhythm - patterns of beats, or stresses, in a poem
    b. Rhyme - repetition of sounds at the ends of words (Moon in June)
    c. Alliteration - repetition of consonant sounds at the beginnings of syllables (Peter Piper picked a peck)
    d. Onomatopoeia - use of words like meow or beep that sound like what they mean.

3. Techniques of meaning:
    a. using images -- a concrete word or phrase that names something that can be seen, heard, touched, tasted or smelled.
    b. using figures of speech -- statements that have more than a straightforward literal meaning.

Common figures of speech:
    a. metaphor - a figure of speech in which one hting is spoken or written about as it if were another.
    b. simile - a comparison using like or as (eyes are like stars)
    c. symbol - a thing that stands for or prepresents both itself and something else (doves for peace, roses for beauty)
    d. personification - a description of something not human as though it were human
Additional terminology:
    irony - the difference between appearance and reality
    Irony of situation -- an event that contradicts the expectations of the characters, the reader, or the audiences of a literary work is an example of irony of situation.
    refrain - one or more lines repeated in a poem or song.
    Repetition is the use again, of a sound, word, or group of words.
    Speaker - the voice that speaks , or narrates, the poem.
    Parallelism - the expression of similar ideas in a a similar way.
    Apostrophe - a poem that addresses an object or person directly.
    Aim - a writer's aim is his or her purpose or goal.
    Haiku - a traditional Japanese three line poem. It has five sylllables in a the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. A traditional Japanese haiku presents an image in order to arouse in the reader a specific emotional state.
    flashback - a part of a story, poem, or play that presents events that happened at an earlier time.
    theme - a central idea in a poem
    Hyperbole - an exaggeration made for effect.
    motivation - the force that moves a character to think, feel, or behave in a certain way
  • William Wordsworth's Complete Poetical Works
  • Emily Dickinson's Poems
  • Oscar Wilde's poems
  • Edgar Allen Poe's poems