1. Poetry

2. What is Poetry?
Poetry is a composition written for performance by the human voice.
What your eye sees on the page is the composer’s verbal score, waiting for your voice to bring it alive as you read it aloud or hear it in your mind’s ear.
Poems DO NOT HAVE TO RHYME.

3. Classifications of Poetry
There are three main classifications of poetry:
Epic: a long narrative poem, frequently extending to several “books” on a great or serious subject.(ex: Spenser’s The Faerie Queen or Milton’s Paradise Lost)
Dramatic: poetry, monologue or dialogue, written in the voice of a character assumed by the poet. (ex: Tennyson’s “Ulysses” or Browning’s “My Last Duchess”)
Lyric: The term is now used for any fairly short poem and is the most common.(ex: blank verse, ballads, sonnets etc.)

4. Form of poetry Poems are devised into lines and stanzas.
It is an ancient Mariner
And he stoppeth one of three.
-- ‘By thy long gray beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?
Lines: The way poets arrange words together. They may or may not be sentences.
Stanzas: Groups of lines in traditional poetry (think: paragraph)

5. Form of poetry contd. Groups of lines and stanzas have special names:
Couplet: A pair of lines that rhyme
Triplet: A series of three lines that rhyme
Quatrain: A series of four lines that rhyme. The rhyme scheme can be abab, abba, or aaaa.
Octave: An eight line stanza. It may be formed by linking two quatrains together. It might have a rhyme scheme that integrates all eight lines. The first eight lines of an Italian Sonnet are called an octave.

6. Sample Rhyme Scheme
The Germ By Ogden Nash A mighty creature is the germ, Though smaller than the pachyderm His customary dwelling place Is deep within the human race. His childish pride he often pleases By giving people strange diseases. Do you, my poppet, feel infirm? You probably contain a germ.

7. Free verse poetry
Poems that do not usually rhyme and have no fixed rhythm or pattern.
They are written like a conversation.

8. Meter A pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.
Meter occurs when the stressed and unstressed syllables of the words in a poem are arranged in a repeating pattern.
When poets write in meter, they count out the number of stressed (strong) and unstressed (weak) syllables for each line.
They repeat the pattern throughout the poem.

9. Poetic Sound Techniques
Assonance: involves the repetition of similar vowel sounds within the stressed syllables of a series of words
Ex: Flash with a rash gimme my cash flickin' my ash
Consonance: involves the repetition of the same consonant sounds at the end of accented syllables.
Ex: Rap rejects my tape deck, ejects projectile Whether Jew or Gentile, I rank top percentile,
Alliteration: Consonant sounds repeated at the beginning of words.
Ex: If Peter picked a peck of pickled peppers, how many pickled peppers did Peter peck?

10. Poetic Sound Techniques Contd.
Repetition: The repeating of sounds, words, phrases, or lines in a poem.
Ex: I like popcorn!
I like candy!
I like chips!
I like ice cream!
I need to brush my teeth!
Onomatopoeia: the sound of the word reflects its meaning.
Ex: BANG! Buzz

11. Figurative Language
Figurative language are words or phrases that help the reader picture things in a new way.
Personification: Giving human qualities to an animal or object.
Ex: The house glowed with happiness.
Imagery: words or phrases that appeal to the five senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, hearing. It helps paint a picture in the readers mind.
Ex: The hamburgers sizzled on the grill.

12. Figurative Language Contd.
Idiom: An expression where the literal meaning of the words is not the meaning of the expression. It means something other than what it is saying.
Ex: It is raining cats and dogs.
Metaphor: A comparison of two unlike things without using “like” or “as”.
Ex: His face is a puzzle to me, I can never figure out what he is thinking.
Simile: A comparison of two unlike things using “like” or “as”.
Ex: Her smile was bright like the sun!

13. Figurative Language Contd.
Symbol/ Symbolism: When a person, place, thing or event that has meaning in itself also represents, or stands, for something else.
Ex:
Innocence =
America =
Peace =

14. Figurative Language Contd.
Allusion: reference to something in history or literature.
Connotation: emotions and ideas associated with a word.
Hyperbole: a statement of exaggeration.
Irony: discrepancy between expectation and reality or between words and intention.