1. Poetry: Versification: The Principles and Practice of Writing Verse
Poetry Unit
English 1A
2010

2. What is a poem?
Take 2 minutes and jot down all the elements that a work must include to be considered a poem?
What is the length?
What is the point of view?
Etc.

3. A Poem
A poem is a composition written for performance by the human voice.
Simultaneous engagement of eye and ear
What must your eye be attentive to? Your ear?
What a poem says or means is the result of how it is said.

4. My Papa’s Waltz By Theodore Roethke
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scarped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

5. Classification Poetry can be classified into 3 broad categories:
Epic: a long narrative poem, frequently extending to several “books” or sections
John Milton’s Paradise Lost
Homer’s The Odyssey

6. Classification
Dramatic: Poetry, monologue, or dialogue, written in the voice of a character assumed by the poet
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses
Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess

7. Classification
Lyric: originally, a song performed in ancient Greece to the accompaniment of a small harplike instrument called a lyre. The term is now used for any fairly short poem in the voice of a single speaker, although that speaker may sometimes quote others.
“I” in the poem is not necessarily the author.

8. Rhythm The sequence of syllables (stressed and unstressed)
What we hear when we read the poem aloud

9. Meter
If a poem’s rhythm is structured into a recurrence of regular/approximately equal units, we call it meter
Accentual-syllabic meter: most common metrical system in English poetry
Iambic: an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable
It was/ the best/ of times/ it was/ the worst/ of times
Trochaic: a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable
London/ bridge is/ falling/ down

10. Meter
Anapestic: two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable
The Assyr/ ian came down/ like the wolf/ on the fold
Dactylic: a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables
Woman much/ missed, how you/ call to me, call to me

11. Meter
Spondaic: two successive syllables with approximately equal strong stresses
Listen!/ you hear/ the grat/ in roar
Pyrrhic: two successive unstressed or lightly stressed syllables

12. Meter: Line Lengths Monometer: one foot Diameter: two feet
Trimeter: three feet
Tetrameter: four feet
Pentameter: five feet
Hexameter: six feet
Heptameter: seven feet
Octameter: eight feet

13. Varying the Pattern of Poetry
An important factor in varying the pattern of a poem is the placing of its pauses, or caesurae
End stopped
Run-on lines
Enjambment: the thrust of the incompleted sentence carries on over the end of the verse line

14. Rhyme End rhyme Internal rhyme Slant rhyme Eye rhymes
Vowel rhyme (assonance)

15. Poetic Form
Blank Verse: unrhymed iambic pentameters; standard meter for Elizabethan poetic drama; no verse form is closer to the natural rhythms of spoken English
Couplet: two lines of verse, usually coupled by rhyme
Tercet: a stanza of three lines linked with a single rhyme

16. Poetic Form Quatrain: a stanza of four lines, rhymed or unrhymed
The Sonnet: a poem of fourteen iambic pentameters linked by an intricate rhyme scheme
Villanelle: a French verse; five tercets rhyming aba followed by a quatrain rhyming abaa