Acrostic: A poem that uses the first letter in each line to spell a word or phrase
Ballad: A poem that tells a story
Cento: A poem that uses lines from other poems
Double-dactyl: An eight-line poem in which each line contains two dactyls, a long syllable followed by two shorter syllables (e.g. Roger L. Robinson wrote in “Double-Dactyl”: “Long-short-short, long-short-short/ Dactyls in dimeter/…One sentence (two stanzas)/Hexasyllabically/ Challenges poets who/ Don’t have the time.”)
Elegy: A sad and thoughtful poem, often about an individual who died
Epic: Long narrative poem
Ghazal: A type of classical Middle Eastern poetry with 5 to 15 rhyming couplets and a shared refrain at the end of the second line
Haiku: Traditional Japanese poem with three lines; the first and third lines have five syllables, the second line has seven syllables
Lyric: A poem about the speaker’s feelings, moods or thoughts
Narrative: A poem that recounts a story
Ode: A three-part poem about a serious subject
Pantoum: A poem with two or more four-line stanzas; the second and fourth lines in one stanza are also the first and third lines of the next stanza
Sonnet: A 14-line poem written in iambic pentameter; common forms include English sonnets and Italian sonnets
Shi: Classical Chinese poems in which the even lines rhyme
Tanka: Similar to a haiku, but follows a 5-7-5-7-7 syllable pattern
Terza rima: A poem with stanzas that follow an aba, bcb, cdc, ded… rhyming pattern
Structural Elements in Poetry Styles
Stanza: A group of lines in a poem
Line: Individual line in a poem; it does not have to complete a sentence or thought
Couplet: Stanzas with two lines
Quatrain: Stanzas with four lines
Enjambment: When an idea in one line carries on to the next
Caesura: Punctuation that doesn’t occur at the end of a line
Feet: The type of two- or three-syllable unit on which a meter is based; a foot is the number and type of syllables in a meter; an iambic foot, for example, has an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable (e.g. the word “destroy”); types of meters include iamb, trochee, dactyl, anapest, spondee and pyrrhic
Meter: Patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables, or feet, in a poem; types of meters include monometer, dimeter, trimester, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, heptameter and octameter
Metrical patterns: The type of dominant foot in a poem and the number of times it appears in a line, such as iambic pentameter, a line with five iambic feet
Rhythm: The rhythmical sounds in a poem because of accented and unaccented syllables in words
Rhyme schemes: The pattern of rhymes at the end of the lines in a poem, indicated using letters; lines with the same letters rhyme with each other