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The form or mode of a poem, such as haiku, epic, sonnet, or free verse.
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73 Poetic Verse Form topics matching:
Filter this Collection| x name | x image | x Poems Of This Form | x article |
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| x Dramatic monologue | Porphyria's Lover |
A dramatic monologue is a piece of spoken verse that offers great insight into the feelings of the speaker. Not to be confused with a soliloquy in a play (which the character speaking speaks to themselves), dramatic monologues suggest an auditor or...
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| My Last Duchess | |||
| x Epic poetry |
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Aeneid |
An epic (from Greek: έπος or επικό "word, story, poem") is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and...
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| Iliad | |||
| Odyssey | |||
| The Faerie Queene | |||
| Paradise Lost | |||
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| x Sonnet |
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Washington Crossing the Delaware |
The sonnet is one of the poetic forms that can be found in lyric poetry from Europe. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song". By the thirteenth century, it had come to signify a...
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| Sonnet 73 | |||
| Sonnet 29 | |||
| Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? | |||
| x Elegy |
An elegy is a mournful, melancholic or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a lament for the dead.
The term "elegy" originally denoted a type of poetic meter (elegiac meter). It commonly describes a poem of mourning, from the Greek elegeia ...
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| x Ode |
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Ode (from the Ancient Greek ὠδή) is a lyrical verse. 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 exist.
It is most likely that...
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| x Free verse | Illuminations |
Philip Hobsbaum identifies three major types of free verse:
Cadenced verse is today based on rhythmical phrases that are more irregular than those of traditional poetic meter. When it is used, it tends to follow a looser pattern than would be...
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| A Supermarket in California | |||
| Four | |||
| Seven | |||
| Five | |||
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| x Lyric poetry |
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A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning |
Lyric poetry is usually a poem with rhyming that expresses personal feelings. It need not be (but can be) set to music. Aristotle, in Poetics 1447a, merely mentions lyric poetry (kitharistike) along with drama, epic poetry, dancing, painting and...
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| x Light poetry |
Light poetry, or light verse, is poetry that attempts to be humorous. Poems considered "light" are usually brief, and can be on a frivolous or serious subject, and often feature wordplay, including puns, adventurous rhyme and heavy alliteration....
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| x Erasure poetry |
Erasure poetry is a form of Found poetry created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem. The results can be allowed to stand in situ or they can be arranged into lines and/or stanzas....
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| x Found poetry |
Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry by making changes in spacing and/or lines (and consequently meaning), or by altering the text by...
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| x Elegiac couplet | Heroides |
Elegiac couplets are a poetic form used by Greek lyric poets for a variety of themes usually of smaller scale than those of epic poetry. The ancient Romans frequently used elegiac couplets in love poetry, as in Ovid's Amores. As with heroic couplets...
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| x Onegin stanza |
Onegin stanza (sometimes "Pushkin sonnet") refers to the verse form invented by Alexander Pushkin for his interpersonal epic Eugene Onegin. The work is (almost wholly) written in verses of iambic tetrameter with the unusual rhyme scheme ...
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| x Quatorzain |
A quatorzain (from French quatorze, fourteen) is a poem of fourteen lines. Historically the term has often been used interchangeably with the term 'sonnet'. Various writers have tried to draw distinctions between 'true' sonnets, and quatorzains....
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| x Diamond poem |
A diamond poem, or diamante is a style of poetry that is made up of six or seven lines. It usually forms a shape of a diamond. The form was developed by Iris Tiedt in A New Poetry Form: The Diamante (1969).
The first and last lines each consist of a...
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| x Dodoitsu |
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 syllabic structure 7-7-7-5 and no rhyme or metre.
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| x Duma |
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A Duma (Ukrainian: дума, plural dumy) is a sung epic poem which originated in Ukraine during the Hetmanate Era around the sixteenth century, possibly based on earlier Kievan epic forms. Historically, dumy were performed by itinerant Cossack bards...
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| x Eclogue |
An eclogue is a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. Poems in the genre are sometimes also called bucolics.
The form of the word in contemporary English is taken from French eclogue, from Old French, from Latin ecloga. However it is also...
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| x Bref double |
Bref double is a French poetic form consisting of 3 quatrains and a final couplet, making 14 lines.
There is some debate about the rhyme scheme, though in all versions the scheme consists of three rhymes and 4-5 un-rhymed lines, providing the bref...
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| x Burns stanza |
The Burns stanza is a verse form named after the Scottish poet Robert Burns. It was not, however, invented by Burns, and prior to his use of it was known as the standard Habbie, after the poet Habbie Simpson (1550-1620). It is also sometimes known...
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| x Awdl |
An awdl is a long poem written in Welsh in one of the twenty-four strict metres, using cynghanedd. Such poems are considered among the finest work that a poet can aim to produce, and prizes are given at eisteddfodau for the best awdl.
A famous...
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| x Acrostic |
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An acrostic (from the late Greek akróstichis, from ákros, "top", and stíchos, "verse") is a poem or other form of writing in an alphabetic script, in which the first letter, syllable or word of each line, paragraph or other recurring feature in the...
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| x Alcmanian verse |
Alcmanian verse refers to the dactylic tetrameter in Greek and Latin poetry.
Ancient metricians called the dactylic tetrameter the Alcmanic because of its use by the Archaic Greek poet Alcman, as in fragment 27 PMG:
This length is scanned like the...
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| x Ballade |
A ballade (French pronunciation: [baˈlad], French for "ballad") refers to a one-movement musical piece with lyrical and dramatic narrative qualities.
The term ballade was used to describe one type of musical setting of French poetry common in the...
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| x Cento |
In poetry, a cento is a work wholly composed of verses or passages taken from other authors; only disposed in a new form or order.
The term comes from the Latin cento, a cloak made of patches; and that from the Greek κεντονιον. The Roman soldiers...
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| x Cadae |
Cadae is an experimental Western poetry form similar to the Fib. While the Fib is based on the Fibonacci sequence, the cadae is based on the number Pi. The word "cadae" is the alphabetical equivalent of the first five digits of Pi, 3.1415.
The form...
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| x Fib |
Fib is an experimental Western poetry form, bearing similarities to haiku, but based on the Fibonacci sequence. That is, the typical fib and one version of the contemporary Western haiku both follow a strict structure. The typical fib is a six line,...
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| x Choriambic verse |
Choriambic verse, or Choriambics, is the name given to Greek or Latin lyrical poetry in which the metrical unit or 'foot' called the choriambus predominates. The choriambus is a verse-foot consisting of a trochee united with and preceding an iambus ...
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| x Ci |
Ci (simplified Chinese: 词; traditional Chinese: 詞; pinyin: cí, interchangeable with 辭) is a kind of lyric Chinese poetry. For speakers of English, the word "ci" is pronounced somewhat like "tsuh". It is also known as Changduanju (長短句/长短句 "lines of...
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| x Englyn |
Englyn (plural englynion) is a traditional Welsh and Cornish short poem form. It uses quantitative metres, involving the counting of syllables, and rigid patterns of rhyme and half rhyme. Each line contains a repeating pattern of consonants and...
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| x Grook |
A grook ("gruk" in Danish) is a form of short aphoristic poem. It was invented by the Danish poet and scientist Piet Hein. He wrote over 7,000 of them, most in Danish or English, published in 20 volumes. Some say that the name is short for "GRin &...
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| x Ghazal |
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The ghazal (Arabic/Persian/Urdu: غزل; Hindi: ग़ज़ल; Punjabi: ਗ਼ਜ਼ਲ, غزل; Turkish: gazel) is a poetic form consisting of rhyming couplets and a refrain, with each line sharing the same meter. A ghazal may be understood as a poetic expression of both...
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| x Glawn |
Glawn or gaun (Thai กลอน) is a verse form used in the poetry and song of the Lao people; it is the most common text in traditional mor lam. It is made up of four-line stanzas, each with seven basic syllables (although sung glawn often includes extra...
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| x Haiku |
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Haiku (俳句, haikai verse) listen (help·info), plural haiku, is a form of Japanese poetry, consisting of 17 moras (or on), in three metrical phrases of 5, 7, and 5 moras respectively. Haiku typically contain a kigo, or seasonal reference, and a...
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| x Ottava rima |
Ottava rima is a rhyming stanza form of Italian origin. Originally used for long poems on heroic themes, it later came to be popular in the writing of mock-heroic works. Its earliest known use is in the writings of Giovanni Boccaccio.
The ottava...
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| x Masnavi |
The masnavi (Persian: مثنوی, also transcribed as mathnawi; Turkish: mesnevî) is a poetic form in Persian and Ottoman literature.
The masnavi consists of an indefinite number of couplets, with the rhyme scheme aa/bb/cc, etc.
By far the most well...
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| x Limerick |
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A limerick is a five-line poem with a strict form (AABBA), which intends to be witty or humorous, and is sometimes obscene with humorous intent. It may have its roots in the 18th century Maigue Poets of Ireland, although the form can be found in...
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| x Heroic verse |
Heroic verse consists of the rhymed iambic line or heroic couplet. The term is used in English exclusively.
In ancient literature, heroic verse was synonymous with the dactylic hexameter. It was in this measure that those typically heroic poems, the...
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| x Lục bát |
Lục bát is a traditional Vietnamese verse form that is deeply tied to the soul of Vietnamese culture and people. "Lục bát" is Sino-Vietnamese for "six eight", referring to the alternating lines of six and eight syllables. It will always begin with a...
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| x Muwashshah |
Muwashshah or muwaššah (Arabic: موشّح, literally "girdled"; plural muwāshshahāt موشـّحات or tawāshīh تواشيح) is an Arabic poetic form, as well as a secular musical genre in the eastern part of the Arab world using muwaššah texts as lyrics. The...
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| x Paradelle |
A paradelle is a modern poetic form which was invented by United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins as a parody of the villanelle.
Billy Collins originally said the paradelle was invented in eleventh century France, but he later admitted that he...
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| x Rondel |
A rondel is a verse form originating in French lyrical poetry, later used in the verse of other languages as well, such as English and Romanian. It is a variation of the rondeau consisting of two quatrains followed by a quintet (13 lines total) or a...
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| x Saj' |
Saj‘, سـجـع is a form of rhymed prose in Arabic literature. It is named so because of its evenness or monotony, or from a fancied resemblance between its rhythm and the cooing of a dove. It is a highly artificial style of prose, characterized by a...
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| x Sapphic stanza |
The Sapphic stanza, named after Sappho, is an Aeolic verse form spanning four lines (more properly three, in the poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus, where there is no word-end before the final Adonean).
The form is two hendecasyllabic verses, and a third...
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| x Scifaiku |
Scifaiku (science fiction haiku) is a form of science fiction poetry first announced by Tom Brinck with his 1995 Scifaiku Manifesto. It is inspired by Japanese haiku, but explores science, science fiction, and other speculative fiction themes, such...
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| x Senryū |
Senryū (川柳, literally 'river willow') is a Japanese form of short poetry similar to haiku in construction: three lines with 17 or fewer "on" (not syllables) in total. Senryū tend to be about human foibles while haiku tend to be about nature, and...
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| x Sestina |
A sestina' (also, sextina, sestine, or sextain) is a highly structured poem consisting of six six-line stanzas followed by a tercet (called its envoy or tornada), for a total of thirty-nine lines. The same set of six words ends the lines of each of...
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| x Sicilian octave |
The Sicilian octave (Italian ottava siciliana or ottava napoletana, lit. "Neapolitan octave") is a verse form consisting of eight lines of eleven syllables each, called a hendecasyllable. The form is common in late medieval Italian poetry . In...
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| x Sijo |
Sijo (Korean pronunciation: [ɕidʑo]) is a Korean poetic form. Bucolic, metaphysical and cosmological themes are often explored. The three lines average 14-16 syllables, for a total of 44-46: theme (3, 4,4,4); elaboration (3,4,4,4); counter-theme (3...
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| x Song That Luc Bat |
The Song Thất Lục Bát (literally "double seven, six eight") is a Vietnamese form, which consists of a quatrain of two seven syllable lines, followed by a six syllable line and an eight syllable line.
In Vietnamese, the form uses an internal rhyme...
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| x Spenserian stanza | The Faerie Queene |
The Spenserian stanza is a fixed verse form invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem The Faerie Queene. Each stanza contains nine lines in total: eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a single 'Alexandrine' line in iambic hexameter. The...
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| x Tagelied |
The Tagelied (dawn song) is a particular form of mediaeval German language lyric, taken and adapted from the Provençal troubadour tradition (in which it was known as the alba) by the German Minnesinger. Often in three verses, it depicts the...
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| x Tanaga |
The Tanaga is a type of short Filipino poem, consisting of four lines with seven syllables each with the same rhyme at the end of each line --- that is to say a 7-7-7-7 Syllabic verse, with an AAAA rhyme scheme as in this example:
In the Tagalog...
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| x Tercet |
A tercet is composed of three lines of poetry, forming a stanza or a complete poem. English-language haiku is an example of an unrhymed tercet poem. A poetic triplet is a tercet in which all three lines follow the same rhyme, a a a; triplets are...
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| x Terza rima |
Terza rima is a rhyming verse stanza form that consists of an interlocking three line rhyme scheme. It was first used by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri.
Terza rima is a three-line stanza using chain rhyme in the pattern A-B-A, B-C-B, C-D-C, D-E-D....
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| x Terzanelle |
A terzanelle is a poetry form which is a combination of the villanelle and the terza rima. It is nineteen lines total, with five triplets and a concluding quatrain OR a total of sixty-six lines, consisting of twelve triplets and a concluding...
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| x Than-Bauk |
The Thanbauk is a Burmese form, consisting of three lines of four syllables each. Traditionally, they are witty and epigrammic.
The rhyme is on the fourth syllable of the first line, the third syllable of the second, and on the second syllable of...
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| x Traethodl |
The traethodl is a Welsh verse form consisting of couplets in which seven-syllabled lines rhyme with alternate accented and unaccented rhyming syllables. It is first attested in medieval Welsh literature. With the addition of cynghanedd, it was...
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| x Triolet |
A triolet (pronounced /ˈtraɪ.əlɨt/ or US: /ˌtriː.əˈleɪ/) is a one stanza poem of eight lines. Its rhyme scheme is ABaAabAB and often all lines are in iambic tetrameter: the first, fourth and seventh lines are identical, as are the second and final...
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| x Venpa |
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Venpa (வெண்பா in Tamil) is a form of classical Tamil poetry. Classical Tamil poetry has been classified based upon the rules of metric prosody. Such rules form a context-free grammar. Every Venpa consists of between two to twelve lines.
Vowels and...
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| x Villanelle | Do not go gentle into that good night |
A villanelle is a poetic form which entered English-language poetry in the 1800s from the imitation of French models. The word derives from the Italian villanella from Latin villanus (rustic). A villanelle has only two rhyme sounds. The first and...
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