Poetic forms

Poetry (from the Greek word poiesis, "making") is a form of literary art that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, literal or surface-level meanings. Any particular instance of poetry is called a poem and is written by a poet. Poets use a variety of techniques called poetic devices, such as assonance, alliteration, consonance, euphony and cacophony, onomatopoeia, rhythm (via metre), rhyme schemes (patterns in the type and placement of a phoneme group) and sound symbolism, to produce musical or other artistic effects. They als

thumb|right|250px|Haiku by Matsuo Bashō reading "Quietly, quietly, / yellow mountain roses fall – / sound of the rapids" is a type of short form poetry that originated in Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases composed of 17 morae (called on in Japanese) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern; that include a kireji, or "cutting word"; and a kigo, or seasonal reference. However, haiku by classical Japanese poets, such as Matsuo Bashō, also deviate from the 17-on pattern and sometimes do not contain a kireji. Similar poems that do not adhere to these rules are generally classified as senryū.

A sonnet is a fixed poetic form with a structure traditionally consisting of fourteen lines adhering to a set rhyming scheme. The term derives from the Italian word sonetto (, from the Latin word sonus, ). Originating in 13th-century Sicily, the sonnet was in time taken up in many European-language areas, mainly to express romantic love at first, although eventually any subject was considered acceptable. Many formal variations were also introduced, including abandonment of the quatorzain limit – and even of rhyme altogether in modern times.

thumb|Maria Wiik, Ballad (1898)

An ode (from ) is a type of lyric poetry, with its origins in Ancient Greece. Odes are elaborately structured poems praising or glorifying an event or individual, describing nature intellectually as well as emotionally. A classic ode is structured in three major parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. Different forms such as the homostrophic ode and the irregular ode also enter.

thumb|upright=1.3|An 1850 acrostic by Nathaniel Dearborn, the first letter of each line spelling the name "JENNY LIND" An acrostic is a poem or other word composition in which the first letter (or syllable, or word) of each new line (or paragraph, or other recurring feature in the text) spells out a word, message or the alphabet. The term comes from the French from post-classical Latin , from Koine Greek , from Ancient Greek "highest, topmost" and "verse". As a form of constrained writing, an acrostic can be used as a mnemonic device to aid memory retrieval. When the last letter of each new li

An elegy is a poem of serious reflection, and in English literature usually a lament for the dead. However, according to The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, "for all of its pervasiveness ... the 'elegy' remains remarkably ill defined: sometimes used as a catch-all to denominate texts of a somber or pessimistic tone, sometimes as a marker for textual monumentalizing, and sometimes strictly as a sign of a lament for the dead".

form of poetry

poetic style

A strophe () is a poetic term originally referring to the first part of the ode in Ancient Greek tragedy, followed by the antistrophe and epode. The term has been extended to also mean a structural division of a poem containing stanzas of varying line length. Strophic poetry is to be contrasted with poems composed line-by-line non-stanzaically, such as Greek epic poems or English blank verse, to which the term stichic applies.

In poetry, a stanza (; from Italian stanza, ; ) is a group of lines within a poem, usually set off from others by a blank line or indentation. Stanzas can have regular rhyme and metrical schemes, but they are not required to have either. There are many different forms of stanzas. Some stanzaic forms are simple, such as four-line quatrains. Other forms are more complex, such as the Spenserian stanza. Fixed verse poems, such as sestinas, can be defined by the number and form of their stanzas.

classical dramatic verse in German and English literature: unrhymed acatalectic or hypercatalectic iambic pentameter without a fixed caesura

type of poetry in classical Japanese literature

In poetry, a couplet ( ) or distich ( ) is a pair of successive lines that rhyme and have the same metre. A couplet may be formal (closed) or run-on (open). In a formal (closed) couplet, each of the two lines is end-stopped, implying that there is a grammatical pause at the end of a line of verse. In a run-on (open) couplet, the meaning of the first line continues to the second.

Pentameter (, 'measuring five (feet)') is a term describing the meter of a poem. A poem is said to be written in a particular pentameter when the lines of the poem have the length of five metrical feet. A metrical foot is, in classical poetry, a combination of two or more short or long syllables in a specific order; although this "does not provide an entirely reliable standard of measurement" in heavily accented Germanic languages such as English. In these languages it is defined as a combination of one stressed and one or two unstressed syllables in a specific order.

poetic form used by Greek lyric poets

A sestina (, from sesto, sixth; Old Occitan: cledisat ; also known as sestine, sextine, sextain) is a fixed verse form consisting of six stanzas of six lines each, normally followed by a three-line envoi. The words that end each line of the first stanza are used as line endings in each of the following stanzas, rotated in a set pattern.

A tercet is composed of three lines of poetry, forming a stanza or a complete poem.

Muwashshah ( '''' 'girdled'; plural '; also ' 'girdling,' pl. ') is a strophic poetic form that developed in al-Andalus in the late 10th and early 11th centuries. The ', embodying the Iberian rhyme revolution, was the major Andalusi innovation in Arabic poetry, and it was sung and performed musically. The muwaššaḥ features a complex rhyme and metrical scheme usually containing five '''' ( 'branches'; sing. '), with uniform rhyme within each strophe, interspersed with ' ( 'threads for stringing pearls'; sing. '') with common rhyme throughout the song, as well as a terminal kharja'' ( 'exit'), t

Anacreontics are verses in a metre used by the Greek poet Anacreon in his poems dealing with love and wine. His later Greek imitators (whose surviving poems are known as the Anacreontea) took up the same themes and used the Anacreontic meter. In modern poetry, Anacreontics are short lyrical pieces that keep the Anacreontic subject matter but not the metre.

Zajal () is a traditional form of oral strophic poetry declaimed in a colloquial dialect. The earliest recorded zajal poet was Ibn Quzman of al-Andalus who lived from 1078 to 1160. Most scholars see the Andalusi Arabic zajal, the stress-syllable versification of which differs significantly from the quantitative meter of classical Arabic poetry, as a form of expression adapted from Romance languages' popular poetry traditions into Arabic—first at the folkloric level and then by lettered poets such as Ibn Quzman.

thumb|200px| The tetractys The tetractys (), or tetrad, or the tetractys of the decad is a triangular figure consisting of ten points arranged in four rows: one, two, three, and four points in each row, which is the geometrical representation of the fourth triangular number. As a mystical symbol, it was very important to the secret worship of Pythagoreanism. There were four seasons, and the number was also associated with planetary motions and music.

thumb|right|300px|alt=Rural landscape with grassy cliff top to the right, sea and shore in the background to the left. Shepherd in a blue smock stands on cliff top to the right, leaning on his staff, with a flock of sheep grazing around him.|A classic pastoral scene, depicting a shepherd with his livestock; a pastoral subject was the initial distinguishing feature of the villanelle. Painting by , 19th century. A villanelle, also known as villanesque, is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first

A hemistich (; via Latin from Greek , from "half" and "verse") is a half-line of verse, followed and preceded by a caesura, that makes up a single overall prosodic or verse unit. In Latin and Greek poetry, the hemistich is generally confined to drama. In Greek tragedy, characters exchanging clipped dialogue to suggest rapidity and drama would speak in hemistichs (in hemistichomythia). The Roman poet Virgil employed hemistichs in the Aeneid to indicate great duress in his characters, where they were incapable of forming complete lines due to emotional or physical pain.

rhyming stanza form; seven lines, usually in iambic pentameter, with rhyme scheme a-b-a-b-b-c-c

Cinquain ( ) is a class of poetic forms that employ a 5-line pattern. Earlier used to describe any five-line form, it now refers to one of several forms that are defined by specific rules and guidelines.

frame|right|Geoffrey Chaucer was an exponent of the palinode.

13-line poem with rhyme scheme ABba abAB abbaA

Antistrophe (, "a turning back") is the portion of an ode sung by the chorus in its returning movement from west to east in response to the strophe, which was sung from east to west.

thumb|right|Detail of a 14th-century manuscript of Dante Alighieri's Commedia, a three-part poem (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) that was divided into 100 cantos. The canto () is a principal form of division in medieval and modern long poetry.

According to one meaning of the word, an epode is the third part of an ancient Greek choral ode that follows the strophe and the antistrophe and completes the movement.

slower emotional type of song within popular music

poetic form of four verses

Kanshi is a Japanese term for Chinese poetry in general as well as the Japanese poetry written in Chinese by Japanese poets. It literally means "Han poetry".

Bouts-Rimés (French, literally 'rhymed-ends') is the name given to a kind of poetic game defined by Addison in the Spectator as "lists of words that rhyme to one another, drawn up by another hand, and given to a poet, who was to make a poem to the rhymes in the same order that they were placed upon the list".

Stichomythia () is a technique in verse drama in which sequences of single alternating lines, or half-lines (hemistichomythia) or two-line speeches (distichomythia) are given to alternating characters. It typically features repetition and antithesis. The term originated in the theatre of Ancient Greece, though many dramatists since have used the technique. Etymologically it derives from the Greek stikhos ("row, line of verse") + muthos ("speech, talk").

thumb|A female aulos-player entertains men at a symposium on this Attic red-figure bell-krater, c. 420 BC A skolion (from ) (pl. skolia), also scolion (pl. scolia), was a song sung by invited guests at banquets in ancient Greece. Often extolling the virtues of the gods or heroic men, skolia were improvised to suit the occasion and accompanied by a lyre, which was handed about from singer to singer as the time for each scolion came around. "Capping" verses were exchanged, "by varying, punning, riddling, or cleverly modifying" the previous contribution.

poetry written in Modernist tradition

A monostich is a poem which consists of a single line.

A clerihew ( ) is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem of a type invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The first line is the name of the poem's subject, usually a famous person, and the remainder puts the subject in an absurd light or reveals something unknown or spurious about the subject. The rhyme scheme is \mathrm{AABB}, and the rhymes are often forced. The line length and metre are irregular. Bentley invented the clerihew in school and then popularized it in books. One of his best known is this (1905):

'''''' describes the four-part structure of many classic Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese narratives. The parts can be summarized as: introduction, development, twist or reversal, and resolution.

Hainteny (pronounced , Malagasy for "knowledge of words") is a traditional form of Malagasy oral literature and poetry, involving heavy use of metaphor. It is associated primarily with the Merina people of Madagascar. In its use of metaphor and allusion it resembles another type of poetry, the Malay pantun, and Fox suggests "it seems likely the Merina brought with them a Malayo-Polynesian poetic tradition" to Madagascar. The Ibonia, an epic poem related for centuries in different versions across Madagascar, reflects the value placed on the linguistic skills celebrated in the hainteny tradition

medieval Korean poetry style

form of storytelling with similarly structured episodes and frequently repeated linguistic formulas

final, shorter stanza (or cobla) that appears in lyric poetry and serves a variety of purposes within several poetic forms

Dodoitsu (都々逸) is a form of Japanese poetry developed towards the end of the Edo period. Often concerning love or work, and usually comical, Dodoitsu poems consist of four lines with the moraic structure 7-7-7-5 and no rhyme for a total of 26 morae, making it one of the longer Japanese forms. The form, tone and structure of Dodoitsu derive from Japanese folk song traditions.

literary form with examples in Old English, Old Norse, and Icelandic

simple song form with repetitive and linked verses, prolonged little by little between them

single-stanza poem in troubadour poetry

rhyming pair of lines in iambic pentameter

funerary inscription in Ancient Rome

Spanish poetic stanza consisting of 11- and 7-syllable lines

Glosa (English: Glose or Gloss) is a poetic form that borrows lines from another, usually more famous poem and incorporates its text. The term originates from the practice of fifteenth century Spanish courtiers composing poems with a quatrain from a better-known poem and the repetition of a line from that quatrain at the end of a newly composed stanza. Most glosa contain an epigraph from the borrowed quatrain followed by four decima. Although it is no longer common in Spain, modern English examples exist including Marilyn Hacker's "Glose".

traditional Vietnamese verse form

form of medieval and Renaissance French poetry

A tuyugh is a classical form of poetry in Central Asia found in classical Turkic poetry. Poets to use this style include Ali-Shir Nava'i and Gadāʾī, who both wrote in Chaghatay.

genre of the Galician-Portuguese lyric

term for poems

The pantoum is a poetic form derived from the pantun, a Malay verse form: specifically from the pantun berkait, a series of interwoven quatrains.

strophe