1. E LEMENTS OF P OETRY

2. Poetry is a literary form that combines the precise meaning of words with their emotional associations, sounds, and rhythms. Many poems are structured in stanzas, or groupings of lines. Specific stanza types include couplets, which have two lines, and quatrains, which have four lines.

3. Poets use figurative language, such as metaphor, simile, personification, and onomatopoeia, to express ideas or feelings in a fresh way.

4. Poets use metaphors to compare two apparently unlike thing without using the words like, as, than, or resembles, as in “The sky is a patchwork quilt.” Poets use similes to make such comparisons using connecting words, as in “The sky is like a patchwork quilt.”

5. Personification is language that attributes human qualities to nonhuman things. Onomatopoeia is the use of a word whose sound imitates its meaning. Examples of such words are buzz, hiss, thud, and sizzle. Imagery is descriptive language poets use to create word pictures, or images. Images are enhanced by sensory language, which provides details related to the senses. Allusion is a reference to someone or something that is known from history, literature, religion, politics, sports, science, or some other branch of culture.

6. Poets use a number of sound devices to achieve a musical quality. Rhythm is the pattern created by the stressed and unstressed syllables of words in sequence. A controlled pattern of rhythm is called meter. Rhyme is the repetition of identical or similar sounds in stressed syllables. A pattern of end rhymes is called a rhyme scheme. Free verse has no set meter or rhyme schemes.

7. Alliteration is the repetition of the initial consonant sounds of words, as in the phrase “ dark days.” Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in nearby words, as in the phrase “child of silence.” Consonance is the repetition of consonants within nearby words in which the separating vowels differ, as in the phrase “live and love.” Repetition is the use of any language element more than once.

8. T YPES OF P OETRY Narrative poem – the writer tells a story in verse. Narratives can take many forms. For example, an epic is a long narrative poem about gods or heroes. A ballad is a songlike narrative about an adventure or romance. Dramatic poem – the writer tells a story using a character’s own thoughts or statements Lyric poem – a brief poem in which the author expresses the feelings of a single speaker, creating a single effect on the reader.