Poetry

What is poetry?

Writers often use poetry to express personal, emotional, philosophical, or historical 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

There are different types of poetry. The different forms vary with the above characteristics as well as how they are structured. Ballads, sonnets, and limericks have a specific structure, while other narrative poems may have less rigid structures. Modern poetry appears to be shifting to the use of less formal structures.

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.