Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Poetic Forms
Poetic Forms
Genres
Ballad (“folk” or “popular”): a short story-song that focuses on a significant episode
(e.g., love or adventure). Characteristic ballad meter uses quatrains in which the first
and third lines are iambic tetrameter and do not rhyme, and the second and fourth are
iambic trimeter and do rhyme (abcb); : straightforward; easy to understand; frequently
tragic and plaintive setting, character, events with a climax; beginning, middle, end
character motivation and possibly character development; typically has underlying
theme.
Ballade: French in origin and made up of 28 lines, usually three stanzas of eight lines
and a concluding stanza, called envoy, of four lines. The last line of each stanza is the
same, the scheme is ababbcbc, and the envoy is bcbc.
Concrete Poems: poems in which the words dramatize their meaning with appearance,
draw attention to their physical appearance on the page. Descendant of shaped
poems, which resemble what they discuss.
Elegy (fr. Greek “elegia” for song of mourning): lyric poem written to commemorate
someone who is dead. No given form, though something called an “elegiac stanza”
does exist (four lines of iambic pentamenter, abab)—however, a poem is called an elegy
because of content, not form. Classical elegies follow a pattern: identification of subject,
lamentation, and consolation/acceptance of loss.
Epic (fr. Greek “epos” for speech, story, song): long narrative story that celebrates hero
—focuses on virtues, acts as inspiration for noble action, preserves history. Typically
divided into cantos or books and begins in medias res. Often written in dactylic
hexameter.
Epithalamium: poem that celebrates a marriage. No fixed form but does follow
pattern of content: subject is specific marriage, wedding day is described, bride and
groom are praised, blessings and good wishes for future happiness are expressed.
Free Verse: no identifiable meter, may have rhyming and rhythmical pattern.
Limerick: six-line humorous poem; first, second, and fifth lines rhyming; and the third
and fourth rhyming [AABBA].
Lyric (fr. Greek “lyre”): poem of emotional intensity, describes a feeling; intellectual or
emotional response to a subject; usually focuses on one experience; usually brief;
depend heavily on musical and rhythmical qualities.
Ode: poem of indefinite length, divided in ten-line stanzas, rhymed, with different
schemes for each stanza, written in iambic meter.
Sestina: complicated verse form that consists of six stanzas of six-lines each and a
three-line concluding stanza called an envoy. The sestina uses the same six words to
conclude lines and follows a strict pattern which culminates in the envoy that includes
all six recurrent words. (Here, letters stand for words, not rhymes: abcdef, faebdc,
cfdabe, ecbfad, deacfb, bdfeca and eca or ace plus bdf).
Tercet: three-line stanza (called a triplet when all three lines rhyme).
Villanelle: fixed form consisting of nineteen lines divided into six stanzas: five tercets
and a concluding quatrain. Employs only two rhymes—aba, aba, aba, aba, aba, abaa.
Repeats lines as follows: line one is also six, twelve, eighteen; line three is also nine,
fifteen, nineteen; and the first and third lines are repeated as rhymed couplets at end.
Sources: The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (ed. Alex Preminger, New
York: Princeton UP, 1965), and The Teacher and Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms (ed.
Ron Padgett, New York: Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 1987.).