Form and Technique in Poetry
- Forms and Types
- Received (given) forms; sonnet, quatrain, villanelle, sestina, haiku, etc.
- Free verse forms.
- Lyric; narrative; dramatic; prose; ballad (folk, literary, popular).
- Voice (who is speaking and how)-similar to a narrator in fiction.
- Point of view; persona or apparently personal.
- Dramatic monologue.
- Tone; irony, satire, etc.
- Intensity, atmosphere, mood.
- Diction (word choice)-associated with imagery, sound, rhythm.
- Concrete or abstract.
- Denotation, connotation, implication.
- Vulgar, colloquial/informal, formal.
- Syntax, or sentence structure.
- Imagery (concrete representation of sensory experience)-sense appeal.
- Amount and type of sensory detail.
- Metaphor; simile; personification; allusion.
- Synesthesia; describing a sense impression using words that normally describe another.
- Hyperbole or understatement.
- Metonymy; substituting one word/phrase for another, closely associated word/phrase.
- Synecdoche; using a part to refer to the whole, or the whole to refer to a part.
- Sound (vowels and consonants)-appeals to the ear, contributes to meaning.
Alliteration; repetition of an initial sound in two or more words of a phrase.
- Assonance (repetition of vowels) and/or consonance (repetition of consonants).
- Onomatopoeia; using a word that is defined through both its sound and meaning.
- Euphony (smooth, pleasant sound) vs. cacophony (rough, harsh sound).
- Rhythm (pattern of beats in a stream of sound)-appeals t
- the ear, contributes to meaning.
- The line; end-stopped (self-enclosed) or enjambed.
- Feet; iambs, trochees, anapests, dactylics, etc.
- Meter; mono-, di-, tri-, tetra-, penta-, hexa-, etc.
- Repetition.
- Rhyme (corresponding terminal sounds)-appeals t
- the ear; associated with form.
- True; words sound nearly identical and rhyme on one stressed syllable.
- Slant (near/off); words do not exactly rhyme, but almost rhyme.
- End rhyme (at end of line) and/or internal rhyme (similar sounds within one line).
- Masculine (lines end w/ stressed syllable); feminine (lines end w/ unstressed syllable).
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