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The form or mode of a poem, such as haiku, epic, sonnet, or free verse.
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79 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 |
M. H. Abrams notes the following three features of the dramatic monologue as it applies to poetry:
One of the most important influences on the development of the dramatic monologue is the Romantic poets. The long, personal lyrics typical of the...
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| My Last Duchess | |||
| x Epic poetry |
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Aeneid |
An epic (from the Ancient Greek adjective ἐπικός (epikos), from ἔπος (epos) "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....
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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 |
A sonnet is a form of poetry that originated in Europe, mainly Italy: the Sicilian poet Giacomo da Lentini is credited with its invention. They commonly contain 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives only from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian...
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| Sonnet 73 | |||
| Sonnet 29 | |||
| Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? | |||
| x Elegy | A Poem for a Poet |
In literature, an elegy is a mournful, melancholic or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a lament for the dead.
The Greek term elegeia (ἐλεγεία) originally referred to any verse written in elegiac couplets and covering a wide range of...
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| "A Poet is a Clinton D. Powell" | |||
| Notes for an Elegy in the Key of Michael (Jackson) 1 and 2 | |||
| Poems by Aberjhani | |||
| The Consecrated Soul of Whitney Houston | |||
| x Ode |
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Poems by Aberjhani |
Ode (from the Ancient Greek ὠδή) is a type of 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 an...
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| The Nomad's Vision: Ode to a Skylark Dressed in Black | |||
| x Free verse | Illuminations |
Free verse is a form of poetry that refrains from consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern.
Poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, is not free. Free Verse displays some elements of form. Most free verse, for...
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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 poet is a genre of poetry that expresses personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric poems were sung, accompanied by a lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat. Aristotle, in...
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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 word play, 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 lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning. The...
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| x Elegiac couplet | Heroides |
The elegiac couplet is a poetic form used by Greek lyric poets for a variety of themes usually of smaller scale than the epic. Roman poets, particularly Ovid, adopted the same form in Latin many years later. As with the English heroic, each couplet...
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| x Onegin stanza |
Onegin stanza (sometimes "Pushkin sonnet") refers to the verse form popularized (or invented) by the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin through his novel in verse Eugene Onegin. The work was mostly written in verses of iambic tetrameter with the rhyme...
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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 seven lines. The words form the shape of a diamond. The form was developed by Iris Tiedt in A New Poetry Form: The Diamante (1969).
A diamante poem Diamonte poetry is a poem that...
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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 in 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 who used it in some fifty poems. It was not, however, invented by Burns, and prior to his use of it was known as the standard Habbie, after the piper Habbie Simpson (1550...
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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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The Onyx of Savannah on Red Room |
An acrostic (from French acrostiche
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| Astride the Promise of Change | |||
| 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 Cento |
A cento is a poetical 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 κέντρων. The Roman soldiers used...
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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; Wade–Giles: tz'ŭ, and, to a point, interchangeable with 辭/辞) is a kind of lyric Classical Chinese poetry using a set of poetic meters derived from a base of certain patterns of fixed...
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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/Malay/Pashto/Persian/Urdu: غزل; Hindi: ग़ज़ल, Punjabi: ਗ਼ਜ਼ਲ, Turkish: gazel, Bengali: গ়জ়ল, Gujarati: ગ઼ઝલ) is a poetic form consisting of rhyming couplets and a refrain, with each line sharing the same meter. A ghazal may be...
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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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"War poisons the land/ Like diseased minds downloaded/ into bowls of tears." |
Haiku (俳句, haikai verse) listen (help·info) (no separate plural form) is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterised by three qualities:
Modern Japanese gendai (現代) haiku are increasingly unlikely to follow the tradition of 17 on...
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| Angel of Peace | |||
| Notes for an Elegy in the Key of Michael (Jackson) 1 and 2 | |||
| Poems by Aberjhani | |||
| Angel of Christmas Love Shining Bright | |||
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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 |
Masnavi, or mathnawī, is the name of a poem written in rhyming couplets, or more specifically, “a poem based on independent, internally rhyming lines”. Most mathnawī followed a meter of eleven, or occasionally ten, syllables, but had no limit in...
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| x Limerick |
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A limerick is a kind of a witty, humorous, or nonsense poem, especially one in five-line anapestic or amphibrachic meter with a strict rhyme scheme (AABBA), which is sometimes obscene with humorous intent. The form can be found in England as of the...
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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 muwaššaḥ (Arabic: موشّح, literally "girdled"; plural muwāshshaḥāt موشـّحات or tawāshīḥ تواشيح) can mean:
Examples of muwaššaḥ poetry start to appear as early as the 9th or 10th century. The full sense of the word is thought to come...
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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‘,(Arabic: 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,...
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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 total morae (or "on", often translated as syllables, but see the article on onji for distinctions). Senryū tend...
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| x Sestina |
A sestina (Occitan: sestina [sesˈtinɔ]; Catalan: sextina [sə(k)sˈtinə] or [se(k)sˈtina]; also known as sestine, sextine, sextain or sesta rima) is a structured 39–line poem consisting of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three–line stanza...
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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 ( pronounced like "she-Joe"; 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 ...
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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 comprising a couplet of two seven-syllable lines followed by a Lục bát couplet (a six-syllable line and an eight-syllable line). Each line...
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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 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 AABB rhyme scheme as in this example:
In the Tagalog original,...
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| x Tercet | Gratitudes of a Dozen Roses |
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.
The literal translation of terza rima from Italian is 'third rhyme'. Terza rima is a three...
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| x Terzanelle |
A terzanelle is a poetic form combining aspects of the villanelle and the terza rima. It is nineteen lines total, with five triplets and a concluding quatrain. The middle line of each triplet stanza is repeated as the third line of the following...
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| x Than-Bauk |
Thanbauk (Burmese: သံပေါက်,pronounced [θàɴ baʊʔ]) 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...
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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 ( /ˈtraɪ.əlɨt/ or US /ˌtriː.əˈleɪ/) is a 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 lines, thereby...
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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 that entered English-language poetry in the 19th century 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...
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| The House on the Hill | |||
| The Waking | |||
| One Art | |||
| Mad Girl's Love Song | |||
| x Virelai |
A virelai is a form of medieval French verse used often in poetry and music. It is one of the three formes fixes (the others were the ballade and the rondeau) and was one of the most common verse forms set to music in Europe from the late thirteenth...
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