Haha, more plant puns! You’ll be seeing a lot more of those, and I don’t regret it all. You might though. Like puns, poetry is another p-word that seems to make a lot of the general populace groan. “It’s too pretentious” (ooo look another p-word), “it’s boring,” “it’s just people with no rhythm attempting to rap”….the list goes on and on. I’m here to try to demystify—or possibly further confirm those views by breaking down what I’ve determined to be some of the most important aspects to poetry. Do you need this breakdown to use these aspects in your own work? No, definitely not. I guarantee you use literary devices like metaphor, hyperbole, and synecdoche all the time in your general speech without even thinking about it. What you do need this for is being able to effectively communicate and critique your own work and others. It’ll in the least get you looking at the words and the page you put them on it in an all new way. I break down poetry into: imagery, syntax, figures of speech, prosody, and punctuation/grammar.
Imagery
Imagery is the primary language of poetry. All the other aspects I talk about below should go towards serving the imagery of the poem in some way. Imagery, however, doesn’t just mean images, but spreads human’s breath of sensations: taste, touch, sight, sound, and smell. Images set the tone, action, act as transitions, push forward arguments, and can metaphorically suggest ideas in the form of symbols. (Prentiss and Wilkins) You could drop three different writers into a meadow, and through what each writer chooses to focus on, you’ll get three different meadows.
I prefer image over abstraction, and to me, it’s no contest. An image of…let’s say, a single white pine with a curved trunk remaining amongst a section of woods subjected to clear cut logging could mean a multitude of things. The writer could be using that single white pine to set a desolate or depressive tone; to set the action of the poem/story into a sad stillness, to argue against clear-cut logging; as a symbol for loneliness, survivor’s guilt, or making note that the tree’s apparent flaw (it’s bent trunk) kept it from the axe; or many other interpretations. However, if the writer simply writes “clear-cut logging is bad,” or “I’m lonely,” it can only be interpreted as “clear-cut logging is bad” or “I’m lonely.” Clark suggests that exploring story or image should take precedent over thinking about a poem’s meaning, because “reading poetry should be, first, a visceral experience and, subsequently, an ideational experience” (Clark).
How do we go about creating image in our words however? Basically by tapping into how you experience the world. I’ve frequently mentioned “sight-writing” before, that’s a perfect example. And while humans are visual creatures, it’s important not to neglect your other senses. The floral scent of lavender soap could conjure up memories of your mother, the taste of a Reese Peanut Butter cups can ignite a small joy, the silkiness of a young maple leaf sets it against the rough bark of the tree’s aged trunk, and the sound of cicadas always makes me yearn for the dog days of summer.
You create images, be they literal or figurative, by being specific and innovative as to not fall into cliché, to evoke a visceral reaction in the reader. A literal image is exactly what it says it is: the maple leaf is simply a maple leaf, but like I showed above with the white pine with the curved trunk, you can also create figurative images. We’ll talk about figurative language and figures of speech below, but basically its language that has a different meaning from the literal. The maple leaf may be simply a maple leaf, but in Canada, it takes on different meanings in different contexts. It could stand for national pride, harken back to our history with maple syrup, etc.
Figuring out if your images are cliché or not and working on creating fresh images that will defy reader expectations will involve work on your part. A cliché being a phrase, thing, or person that is predictable and overused. You can be confident that, if a phrase is a recognized idiom such as “two shakes of a lamb’s tail,” it is cliché. You can avoid cliché by going into the detailed and specific (Prentiss and Wilkins), and you do that not only by employing image and all other aspects of poetry below, but by being a careful observer and being honest with how you experience the world around you (Clark).
Syntax/Diction
Syntax and diction are two closely linked, but different things. Syntax focuses on the set of rules for sentence structure and word order in a language while diction is about word choice. Thus, syntax is a part of grammar while diction is more about writing style. Using incorrect syntax could confuse the reader, while there really is no “wrong” diction as long as you know the correct definition of the words you’re using. Vernacular language is language and diction used in everyday life as opposed to the more formal language you’ll find while reading a science textbook or while trying to impress people.
“Poetry voice” as I and many other poets call it, often doesn’t feel as if it reflects how people generally talk, being more flowery and formal, and that’s perhaps just by the nature of the subjects at hand. However, I find many poems that tip towards formality and use more obscure vocabulary—how should I put this delicately—are shoved up their own asses? Formal language may carry a timelessness about it, but it frequently lacks character and results in blandness. Large, obscure words often throw off the rhythm of a poem overall unless thoughtfully placed, and even if they are properly understood by the person using them, ten dollar words will often stop readers in their tracks, mentally stumbling over the word, and leaving them frustrated.
Syntax and diction are choices that writers make, and there certainly are ways to use formal language and obscure vocabulary to enhance a poem, but it must be done with purpose. Diction is such a huge part of poetry, and many poets (myself often included) feel the need to indulge in flexing their vocabularies to the point of hyperextension, but I feel it only adds to poetry’s bad rap of feeling exclusive, as if you can’t fully enjoy poetry unless you have the vocabulary of Angela Carter (she’s one of my favourite authors but she very much writes word porn) and the “literary pedigree” to catch every reference and name-drop a poet might make. As a writer, reader, and person who studied the English language itself, I’m definitely a sucker for word porn, but it has a time and place. If you are reading along in a poem that is in free verse, written in the vernacular, and suddenly a word gives you pause so that you have to put the book down to look up what it means, the poet has failed in carrying through the movement of the poem unless their intention actually was to stop a reader dead in their tracks and give that particular word more emphasis.
I’m not saying that every reader has to know the meaning of every word, but I still remember one poem in Elizabeth Phillips’ Torch River book, “Lake Aubade” having both the words “glissando” and “meniscus” in it. The first word is a music term while the second word has to do with physics. Maybe there are more violin playing physicists than I know out there, but I feel for most readers this will just throw them off, especially when the imagery and focus of the poem (and the collection overall) seemed to use nature, childhood memories, sex, fatherhood, and the death of a love one as topics and themes.
If the purpose of the poem is to deconstruct or analyze language, or a poem is focusing on a specific topic that has its own jargon that may not be familiar to a general audience (like musical theory or physics for example), it’d be different, but otherwise when “big” words are used in a poem, they tend to distract at best and bring rhythm to a grinding halt at worst. The face of poetry is not monotonous, and when I see poems that reflect this, like in Patricia Smith’s “Man on the TV Say,” “Won’t Be But a Minute,” and “Looking for Bodies” or in the sharp, blunt, and often brutal short fragments David Groulx writes in A Difficult Beauty, I am struck hard by the experiences they describe to me, despite not having lived the trauma of losing my home to Hurricane Katrina or living as a First Nations’ person under systemic and oppressive white supremacy. They shared their experiences in diction and syntax that reflected the topic at hand, which only goes to set the tone and imagery ablaze.
Figures of Speech
I’m not going to go into every single figure of speech that exists. That could be its whole own textbook, and in my case, that’s Stephen Adams Poetic Designs . There’s also more than enough resources and lists online that can get you started simply by typing in “figures of speech,” but I can in the least give you a few examples here. Keeping it simple, you can classify figures of speech into schemes and tropes. A scheme varies the ordinary patterns of sequences and words, such as how alliteration is about repeating successive initial sounds, such as “the red rabbit rapidly runs.” You see this frequently employed in tongue twisters. A trope causes words to carry meanings other than what they ordinarily signify, such as in the infamous metaphor, which is the comparison of two unlike things, such as “The sky’s a field of sheep.” The sky can’t literally be made of sheep, but readers can understand that that means the sky contains many white and fluffy clouds.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica separates figures of speech into five different categories: figures of resemblance or relationship (like the aforementioned metaphor and personification, which is when an inanimate object or abstraction is endowed with human qualities or abilities, such as “the boiling teapot looked angry”); figures of emphasis or understatement (like with hyperbole, which could apply to any situation that a gentleman friend describes the size of his…fish he caught, or an oxymoron, which is when words that denote opposites appear side by side, just as with “jumbo shrimp”); figures of sound (as with alliteration and onomatopoeia, which are words that imitate sounds of the objects they’re associated with, such as we might say a dog “woofs”); verbal games and gymnastics (like my oh-so-favourite puns, which are defined as a play on words or euphemism, which is the substitution of an inoffensive word for an offensive one such as my example above mentioning fish); and errors (such as periphrasis, which is when more words, multiple even, are used than necessary (way too many) to evoke a certain meaning, such as “a small canine individual” to refer to a dog, and spoonerism, which are commonly seen as slips of the tongue, but can be done purposefully by tangling letters between words in a phrase, such as “tons of soils” as “sons of toil”) (Britannica).
The few examples I’ve listed above are only a small morsel of the figures of speech you have at your disposal, and you’ve likely used them in your everyday speech without even thinking about them. Just like with studying different poetic structures and movements, learning new figures of speech can only broaden not only your poet’s toolbox, but your overall skill as a writer. The Wikipedia article on figures of speech can act as a good springboard to get you started.
Prosody
This section is going to be the doozy, and I won’t lie, I’m gonna be throwing a bunch of terminology at you. Prosody encompasses all aspects of poetic meter and form. We’ll therefore be looking briefly at scansion, rhyme, as well as line and stanza form. By considering poetic meter and form, we alter the rhythm of sounds and the tempo at which a reader may take in the poem. If you mainly write in free verse instead of structured forms, you might not even consciously think about meter and form, but they are handy tools in analyzing the “flow” of your poem. By considering prosody against the image of your poem, you can make slow scenes sound slow, or pick up the pace when action is taking place.
Discovering Meter and Rhythm through Scansion
First and foremost, meter is the abstract model in which we measure poetic lines while rhythm is the sounds in words, representing all the accents, pauses, and inflections within a line. Scansion is the way we visually mark meter and rhythm (Adams). While there are many different metrical systems to measure meter and rhythm, most will remember the accentual-syllabic system from high school English class, and it all begins with a foot, the basic unit in which we measure rhythm within a line. The common six kinds of feet include: iambic, trochee, anapest, and dactyl, with rhythmic variations including spondee and pyrrhic. In measuring the different lengths of line, we count the feet in the line to get the meter, these different lengths are called monometer (one-foot line), dimeter (two-foot line), trimeter (three-foot line), tetrameter (four-foot line), pentameter (five-foot line), hexameter (six-foot line), heptameter (seven-foot line), and octameter (eight-foot line). Now that’s a lot to unpack, and to do so, let me use scansion.
While looking at a line of poetry, we mark stressed syllables, unstressed syllables, feet, and caesuras. A stressed syllable represents where we place the emphasis when saying a word, and is typically marked with a slash (/ or -) above the syllable in the word while an unstressed syllable is where we place less emphasis on a word, and is typically marked with a breve or x (a tiny “u” or x) Now, how do we tell if a syllable is stressed or unstressed? There are five main ways to tell: it sounds longer and louder, it has a change in pitch, it is said more clearly, and it uses larger facial movements (Pathare). Consider for example how we pronounce the words desert and desert. They are spelled the same, but have different pronunciations. If we’re talking about the verb meaning “to abandon or leave,” we put more stress on the end syllable while if we mean the noun defining “a desolate place,” we put more stress on the first syllable. When writing scansion, it’d look something like this:
| Desert (verb): | Desert (noun): |
| / u Des-ert | u / Des-ert |
Now, returning to those 6 common types of feet. Iambic and trochaic feet have two marks (u / (unstressed, stressed) and / u (stressed, unstressed) respectively). Then, using the example above, desert (verb) is an example of a trochee and desert (noun) is an example of iamb. Anapestic and Dactylic feet have three marks (u u / (unstressed, unstressed, stressed) and / u u (stressed, unstressed, unstressed) respectively). Spondaic and Pyrrhic feet don’t stand on their own typically, but can act as a substitute for the other four feet to either heighten (spondee, marked as / / (stressed, stressed)) or weaken (pyrrhic, marked as u u (unstressed, unstressed)) emphasis. For more examples of these different feet in action, check out “Metrical Feet” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (yes the guy who wrote the poem about the albatross).The edition we know today was written March 3rd, 1807 in a letter to help his son Derwent learn Greek grammar, and was never intended to be shared, but it now makes its home in many English classrooms (Gradesaver). The first stanza shows off Coleridge’s skill by having the line of poetry that speaks on each foot being written in that foot:
/ u | / u | / u /
Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
/ / | / / || / / ||
Slow spondee stalks; strong foot! Yet ill able
/ u u | / u u | / u u | / u u
Ever to come up with Dactyl trisyllable.
u / | u / | u / | u /
Iambics march from short to long;—
u u / | u u / | u u / | u u /
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng[…] (Coleridge)
Now you may notice I included lines that look like bars on musical sheet music (“|” and “||”). The singular line represents a foot, and you won’t see everyone who scans using these (the original text of the poem certainly didn’t), but I feel they help show off individual feet. The double line represents a caesura, which is when a poetic line pauses in the middle, rather than at the end of a line (called an end-stop, it isn’t marked with anything). As you can see above, caesuras usually happen when you end a sentence (above we see it happen with semicolons and an exclamation point). The “opposite” of a caesura is enjambment (when the idea of one line pushes into the next line, and is typically marked with an arrow (→) where the line continues). Where you decide to stop a line affects a line just as much as the words within it. By ending a line with an end-stop, you show that the idea you were on is finished. Caesuras pause a reader and creates emphasis on the line before it and enjambment rushes them on through to the next line, connecting the thoughts of the two lines together. Ending all your lines with the traditional end-stop may cause your poem to seem monotonous as it’s typically seen as the default way to end a line. Including many caesuras may suggest to the reader that the speaker in the poem is pondering something while enjambment might suggest the speaker in the poem is in a rush or anxious.
Returning to the poem above with the scansion included, we see how the stress—or lack of stress—causes the rhythm of the poem to speed up or to slow down. Trochee does sounds like it’s tripping along, spondee sounds like he’s taking it slow, iambic reflects the usual rhythm people talk to each other, and anapests really seem to move quickly in “a leap and a bound” (Coleridge). Finally, if we were going to describe a line, we use the feet names in combination with the meter. For example, if we look at the line “Ever to come up with Dactyl trisyllable” we would call that dactylic tetrameter. It’s worth noting that iambic pentameter is the most common meter in English poetry. Just like with caesuras and enjambment, the length of the line also creates emphasis. Shorter lines, or even a single word, go by quickly or could cause a reader to wonder why they’ve been singled out if placed between two longer lines while longer lines will move slower. While learning how to do scansion yourself can be challenging—hell knows I still struggle with it—we can clearly see in Coleridge’s poem how the tempo of the poem can be affected.
Looking at Rhyme, Lines, and Stanza
Now, I want to start this discussion of rhyme and form in poems by sharing something that really gets my eye atwitch during a reading of someone’s poetry. Enter stage the abab rhyme scheme. While it is pervasive in much of the older poetry you’ll read, it is absent in much of the contemporary poetry I’ve come across. Each letter represents a line in a poem, with “a” rhyming with “a” and “b” rhyming with “b” and so on. Rhyme schemes also show where a stanza (think of it as a paragraph in poetry) breaks, so if one where to describe a Shakespearean sonnet, it’d be written like this: abab cdcd efef gg. Back to one of my biggest pet peeves in poetry. In my experience, nine times out of ten when rhyming couplets (abab etc…) are used in contemporary poetry, it sounds very rhyme-led (like the words chosen were specifically for the rhyme and don’t necessarily fit otherwise into the grand scheme—pun intended—of the poem), and the scheme is often used without the consideration of the rhyme scheme’s connotations. Sometimes this is done from a place of simply not knowing you have other options, but it often has disastrous results. As shown already by the “Discovering Meter and Rhythm through Scansion” section and soon with the punctuation/grammar section below, we’ll see there are many ways to create varying flow, produce interesting sounds, and create emphasis in your poetry, and using perfect, cross, one syllable rhymes are just one of many. Even though it has been many years, I remember this regular at a local open mic who only performed from two to three poems, all of them abab rhyme schemes. One poem in particular that was from the perspective of a dying solider felt particularly egregious. For better or for worse, the abab rhyme scheme pulls from a long history of nursey rhymes and more comedic poems. Applying that sing-songy quality to a topic that is more serious felt like the poet in question was making light of their own theme, which judging by her delivery was not her intention. I do think that this more innocent rhyme scheme could be paired with a dark topic to create an interesting contrast, but it becomes very obvious, especially when performing a piece, when it’s done with purpose or not. Now with that rant out of the way, what other types of rhymes and stanza forms do we have available to us? Just like with our figures of speech section, the list is nearly endless, but I’ll share some of the more common or interesting ones.
It’s important to note that there is more than one way to rhyme words. Adams shows us that rhymes can be defined in a multitude of ways: nature of similarity, by relationship to stress pattern, by position, and across word boundaries. Some examples are below.
Nature of similarity
Words spelled or sounded out similarly. Words don’t have to match perfectly in sound and letter, but if they are close, they can be an imperfect rhyme. You could also rhyme only by spelling as in an eye rhyme (like in love/move/prove) or by rhyming only the vowels (as in assonance) or consonants (consonant rhyme).
By relationship to stress pattern
One syllable rhymes are “normal rhymes” that occur on the final stressed syllable, but one could rhyme within one word multiple times (extra syllable rhyme) like in dying/flying, or by rhyming a stressed syllable with a secondary stress (light rhyme) as in frog/dialog.
By position
This could mean within a word, such as with alliteration which we mentioned before; within a line (internal rhyme); or throughout a poetic verse (such as a cross rhyme, which the abab rhyme scheme I mentioned earlier is an example of).)
Across word boundaries
This could be rhyming using more than one word (broken rhyme) such as in “But—oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,/Informs us truly, have they not hen-peck’d you all,” or through enjambment aka linked rhyme).
This is only a paraphrase of some of Appendix 1 in Poetic Designs an introduction to meters verse forms and figures of speech by Stephen Adams, but concisely shows the variety that is available to you.
As mentioned before, stanzas are like the paragraphs of poetry, and like paragraphs, add structure, organization, and shape to the work, but can also set a mood or create a pattern in the case of formal verse poetry. Formal verse is opposite to free verse in that it follows a rhyme scheme and meter. Stanzas are named by the amount of lines in them, such as the monostich (a one-lined stanza, which can also be a poem all on its own), couplet (a two-lined stanza that rhymes), tercet (a three-lined stanza in which all lines rhyme, or has an aba rhyming pattern), a quatrain (a four-lined stanza where the second and fourth lines rhyme), a quintain (a five-lined stanza), a sestet (a six-lined stanza), a septet (a seven-lined stanza), and an octave (an eight-lined stanza written in iambic pentameter) (Masterclass).
When we combine structured rhyme and stanzas, we get different poetic forms overall. There is of course formal verse and free verse, but there is also blank verse (poetry with strict meter but no rhyme scheme). In the case of formal verse, there is the sonnet, the terza rima, and the villanelle, for example. In the case of blank verse, we have the haiku, but it seems when it comes to English, blank verse is almost always written in iambic pentameter. English blank verse seems to have had its heyday inbetween the 16th and 20th centuries (Bergman). Poetic form doesn’t have to be limited to blank verse or formal verse, as we see with one of my favourite poetic forms, the pantoum or the interlocking rubaiyat. Of course, with free verse, you aren’t restricted by meter or rhyme, and we see this in shaped/concrete poetry, prose poetry, found poetry, spoken word and the good ol’ acrostic. I guarantee everyone here did at least one acrostic in elementary school. I’ll define all these forms below, but what’s most important to note is that you can write poems with as many restrictions as you want, and while the above forms may give you a head-start, you’re free to organize, pattern, and conceive of your art in any way you want. Poetry is frankly hard to define, and while it is often placed in opposition to prose in its use of meter, rhythm, stanza, and rhyme, it’s that expression and intensity of feelings and ideas through visceral imagery that I feel keeps people reading and writing more of it.
The Aforementioned Examples of Poetic Forms (in order of appearance)
Terza Rima – this Italian form consists of tercets with the first and third lines rhyming with one another and the second line rhyming with the first and third lines of the following tercet. The poem ends with a single line that rhymes with the second line of the last stanza, so it ends up looking something like this: aba, bcb, cdc, … yzy, z (T. E. Britannica)
Villanelle – a villanelle has a total of nineteen lines, consisting of five tercets followed by one quatrain. The tercets follow an aba rhyme scheme while the quatrain follows an abaa rhyme scheme. The first and third lines of the first tercet repeat throughout, and alternate as the final line of the other tercets and appears again as the final two lines of the concluding quatrain. Villanelles frequently use meter, but don’t stick to any one type (Bergman, Villanelle).
Haiku – a three-lined Japanese form in which the first line has 5 syllables, the second 7, and the third 5 again.
Pantoum – is derived from a Malay verse form consisting of a series of interwoven quatrains, though four quatrains is common. The second and fourth lines of each stanza are repeated as the first and third lines of the next stanza, this continues until the final stanza. In the final stanza, while the pattern of the first and third lines remains the same, it changes for the second and fourth line. Either you can write two entirely new lines, or repeat the first and/or third lines from the first stanza, often shifting the previous meaning of the lines. That all sounds complicated, so I’ll visualize it with each letter representing a repeated line: Stanza 1: ABCD, Stanza 2: BEDF, Stanza 3: EGFH, Stanza 4: GI(or A or C)HJ(or A or C). (Sellers). An example of a pantoum I wrote can be found here.
Interlocking Rubaiyat – can be of any length, but consists of quatrains that rhyme aaba. Each successive quatrain picks up the unrhymed line for that stanza, so for a three-stanza poem, it’d look like this: aaba bbcb ccdc. In some cases the final stanza rhymes all four lines (Brewer).
Shaped/Concrete Poetry – both shape and concrete poems use visual means, such as the patterns of words or letters or other typographical devices to convey some, if not all, of their meaning. The main difference between the two seems to be that shape poems can be read like other poems (such as the overall poem being shaped like a heart and the poem itself being about love), while concrete poems aren’t necessarily “read” in the typical sense, but are perceived (Adams), in that they aren’t necessarily composed of words or letters in ways we typically see in poetry and prose.
Prose Poetry – like what it says on the tin, prose poetry doesn’t break itself into lines like most poems do, but in appearance looks like prose. It does still employ other elements of poetry such as rhythm, figures of speech, etc.
Spoken Word – while not necessarily poetry, there’s a focus on word-play and oral performance.
Acrostic – the poem of hidden messages! The simplest form spells out a word or phrase on the left-hand side of the page using the first letter of each line. There’s also a double acrostic which uses the first and last letter of each line (Brewer, Acrostic Poems & Poetry)
Punctuation/Grammar
As seen above in the Coleridge poem, punctuation can be used in the middle of a poetic line to create a caesura, which can create emphasis or slow down the poem among other things. When I began my own poetry journey, I used to think that every line had to end in punctuation, with periods and other sentence-ending punctuation marks representing bigger emphasis, and commas representing when I had to take a quick breath. My early poems were rather stilted, guys. It’s important to think about how punctuation marks are generally used in prose. A period or semi-colon represents the end of idea or phrase, a comma a brief pause, and –em dash representing an aside in the middle of a thought, etc.
Of course, no one is saying you HAVE to use punctuation if you don’t want to. A lack of punctuation throughout the whole poem could have the poem reading like the speaker’s thoughts are all jumbled together. Consider how punctuation could be used or neglected to change meaning (as in the example “let’s eat, Grand pa versus “let’s eat Grand pa) or make the meaning ambiguous. A lack of correct grammar or even misspelled words could suggest that the speaker is uneducated or a small child. Also worth looking at is the capitalization or lowercasing of words to emphasize or de-emphasize them. Typically we capitalize proper nouns to show that they are important in some way. For example, think about how a reader might interpret a poet lowercasing “god” or “him” in reference to the Christian god. Does it show the speaker doesn’t place importance on Christianity, that the speaker isn’t Christian, that God is irrelevant? The possibilities are endless. One could look no farther than E.E. Cummings and Emily Dickinson to see some unique punctuation play. In many of his poems, Cummings would include no capitalization or punctuation, sometimes breaking a line in the middle of a word. Dickinson frequently didn’t even title her poems, used a large amount of –em dashes, and at times seemed to capitalize words haphazardly (Major Characteristics of Dickinson’s Poetry). Perhaps one of the most fun parts of poetry is that you get to consider breaking all the grammar rules that are drilled into our heads in elementary school.
Whew! You made it through the most jargon heavy post I’ve cobbled together (I hope). It’s only a small nibble into the foundations of imagery, syntax, figures of speech, prosody, and punctuation, but I believe it will give any beginner the building blocks to start off their poetry journey.
Works Cited
Adams, Stephen. Poetic designs: an introduction to meters, verse forms, and figures of speech. Peterborough: Broadview Press Ltd, 1997. Print.
Bergman, Bennet. “Blank Verse.” 5 May 2017. LitCharts. Web. 25 August 2020.
—. “Villanelle.” 5 May 2017. Litcharts. Web. 26 August 2020.
Brewer, Robert Lee. “Acrostic Poems & Poetry.” 16 July 2007. Writer’s Digest. Web. 26 August 2020.
—. “Interlocking Rubaiyat: Poetic Form.” 7 January 2016. Reader’s Digest. Web. 26 August 2020.
Britannica, The Editors of the Encyclopaedia. “Figure of Speech.” 20 July 1998. Britannica. Web. 23 August 2020.
—.”Terza rima.” n.d. Encyclodpedia Britannica. Web. 26 August 2020.
Clark, Kevin. The mind’s eye: a guide to writing poetry. United States: Pearson Education, Inc., 2008. Print.
Coleridge, Samuel Tayler. The Poetical Works of S. T. Coleridge Vol. II. London: W. Pickering, 1835. ebook.
Gradesaver. “About Metrical Feet (Coleridge poem).” 25 August 2020. Gradesaver. Web. 2020 August 2020.
“Major Characteristics of Dickinson’s Poetry.” n.d. Emily Dickinson Museum. Web. 26 August 2020.
Masterclass. “Poetry 101: What is a Stanza in Poetry? Stanza Definition with Examples.” 2 July 2019. Masterclass. Web. 25 August 2020.
Pathare, Emma. “Word Stress.” n.d. Teaching English. Web. 25 August 2020.
Prentiss, Sean and Joe Wilkins. Enviromental and Nature Writing A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Print.
Sellers, Heather. The Practice of Creative Writing: A Guide for Students. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 332. Print.