Poetry

What is poetry?

Writers often use poetry to express personal, emotional, philosophical, or historic ideas or themes. Poetry can differ from prose in several ways. Poetry may have some or all of the following characteristics:

• Rhythm
• Rhyme
• Literary devices
• Unusual word or sentence patterns
• Capital letters for each new line

Most poetry has some structure, and it is important to learn some vocabulary about the structure of poems. Lines of poetry (also called a verse) are grouped together into stanzas. Several lines of poetry may be needed to create the equivalent of a sentence. Each line of a poem is usually capitalized. Stanzas are roughly equivalent to paragraphs in prose.

What is rhythm?

When we speak, we tend to emphasize some parts of words more than other parts. We are putting more energy into making some syllables. Rhythm refers to the pattern of stressed syllables and unstressed syllables, and it is sometimes referred to as “meter”.

Dictionaries are valuable. In addition to revealing the meanings of new words, dictionaries can be used to discover how words are broken into syllables, how the syllables are stressed, and how words are pronounced. Dictionaries use marks called “accents” to indicate stressed and unstressed syllables.