Poetry
You!
 Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in
words. --Edgar Allan Poe
 Poetry: the best words in the best order.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
 Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought
and the thought has found words. --Robert Frost
 I've written some poetry I don't understand
myself.
Carl Sandburg
• A type of literature that expresses
ideas, feelings, or tells a story in a
specific form (usually using lines and
stanzas)
Poetic License
 License or liberty taken by a poet, writer,
or other artist to deviate from rule, form,
logic, or fact, in order to produce a
desired effect.
 Two or more lines of poetry that together form
one of the divisions of a poem.
Figurative Language
and
Poetic Devices
“Tools of the Trade”
Comparing 2 things using like or as
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of its mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
Stating one thing is another
My family lives inside a medicine chest:
Dad is the super-size band aid, strong and powerful
but not always effective in a crisis.
Mom is the middle-size tweezer,
which picks and pokes and pinches.
David is the single small aspirin on the third shelf,
sometimes ignored.
Muffin, the sheep dog, is a round cotton ball, stained and dirty,
that pops off the shelf and bounces in my way as I open the door.
And I am the wood and glue which hold us all together with my love.
 A figure of speech in which nonliving things are given
human qualities or human form.
 Examples:
Hunger sat shivering on the road
Flowers danced about the lawn.
Proud Words
By Carl Sandburg
Look out how you use proud words.
When you let proud words go, it is not easy to call them back.
They wear long boots, hard boots, they walk off proud; they
can’t hear you calling –
Look out how you use proud words.
 A figure of speech that give force or intensity to what we say or write; it is exaggeration!
 It can be serious, but hyperbole is often used in a humorous way.
 EXAMPLES: I’m so hungry, I could eat a horse!

She is older than the hills.
My sister uses so much makeup…
•"she broke a chisel trying to get it off last night!" Johnny, from Prescott Middle School,
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA
•"Marilyn Manson freaked out when he saw her!" Nizam, from Bukit Panjang Gov't H. S.,
Singapore
•"she has to use a sandblaster to get it off at night." Margaret
•"that I haven't seen her real face for years ..." Nivedita
•"when she smiles her cheeks fall off." Ed
•"by the time she gets it all on, it's time to take it off!" Josh W.
•"at night she has to get the paint scraper to take it off." Beth Atkins
•Courtesy of www.worsleyschool.net
 Words that imitate the sound they are naming
Buzz
BOOM
Chirp
Consonant sounds repeated at the beginnings
of words
 If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled
peppers, how many pickled peppers did Peter
Piper pick?
 Repetition of vowel sounds
 Assonance is used to
convey and reinforce some meaning or to link
ideas in the poem.
 Tune/food
Cacophony
– Sharp, hissing words
• Ungainly, ghastly, gaunt
 Occurrence of same or similar sounds at the
end of two or more words
 Ex: cat/hat, desire/fire,
observe/deserve
His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy
There’s vomit on his sweater already, mom’s spaghetti
He’s nervous, but on the surface he looks calm and ready
To drop bombs, but he keeps on forgetting
Internal rhyme
 Rhymes inside the same line
External rhyme
 Rhymes that are the last words
Slant rhyme
 Inexact rhymes: dizzy/lazy
Pattern of rhymes used in a poem usually
marked by letters
 abab
 aabb
 abcb
 The Germ
 by Ogden Nash
 A mighty creature is the germ,
 Though smaller than the pachyderm.
 His customary dwelling place
 Is deep within the human race.
 His childish pride he often pleases
 By giving people strange diseases.
 Do you, my poppet, feel infirm?
 You probably contain a germ.
a
a
b
b
c
c
a
a
 Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
 Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
 My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
 He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
 The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
 Recurrences of stressed and unstressed syllables
at equal intervals, similar to meter.
Syllabic meter
 Counting the number of syllables in each line
Foot Meter
 counting the number of feet per line
 Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
Iambic pentameter is a meter in poetry. It refers to a
line consisting of five iambic feet. The word
"pentameter" simply means that there are five feet in
the line;
 An iambic foot is an unstressed syllable followed by a
stressed syllable. We could write the rhythm like this:







daDUM A line of iambic pentameter is five of these in a
row:
daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM We can notate
this with a ‘u' mark representing an unstressed syllable
and a '/' mark representing a stressed syllable. In this
notation a line of iambic pentameter would look like
this:
u/u/u/u/u/
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
We can notate the scansion of this as follows:
u / u /
u /
u / u
/
To swell the gourd ,and plump the ha-zel shells
 iambic pentameter (5 iambs, 10 syllables)
unstressed+stressed

That time | of year | thou mayst | in me | behold
 trochaic tetrameter (4 trochees, 8 syllables)
 Tell me | not in | mournful | numbers
 anapestic trimeter (3 anapests, 9 syllables)
 And the sound | of a voice | that is still
dactylic hexameter (6 dactyls, 12 syllables;)
 This is the | forest pri | meval, the | murmuring | pine and
the | hemlocks
1. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s
day?
2. Laugh at the stupid, but cry for the
weaker one
3. Beat the clear and sunny water
provides an answer to question,
“What is the work about?”
 The writer’s attitude toward the work. May be
playful, formal, intimate, angry, serious, ironic,
baffled, outraged, tender, serene, depressed, etc.
Then, without warning, a knock came at the
door.
 Literary form
 Tragedy,
epic, comedy, novel, essay, lyric poem,
sonnet, etc
Language that appeals to the senses.
Many images are visual, but they can also
appeal to the senses of sound, touch, taste, or
smell.
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather . .
from “Those Winter Sundays”
By Robert Hayden
SYMBOLISM
• When a person, place, thing,
or event that has meaning
in itself also represents, or
stands for, something else.
=
=
Innocence
America
=
Peace
Blank verse
 Poetry written in unrhymed iambic
pentameter. Shakespeare wrote most of his
plays in blank verse
Free verse
 Unrhymed poetry with
lines of varying length
with no specific
patterns
 Rhyming stanzas made up of 2 lines
I'm nobody! Who are You?
Poets repeat
words and
sounds for effect
or emphasis.
I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody too?
Then there's a pair of us-don't tell!
They'd banish us you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
how public, like a frog.
To tell your name livelong day
To an admiring bog!
Emily Dickinson
1830-1885
I'm nobody! Who are You?
Poets repeat
words and
sounds for effect
or emphasis.
I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody too?
Then there's a pair of us-don't tell!
They'd banish us you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
how public, like a frog.
To tell your name livelong day
To an admiring bog!
Emily Dickinson
1830-1885
A lyric poem that is 14 lines long

A Japanese poem
written in three lines,
usually about nature.
 Five Syllables
 Seven Syllables
 Five Syllables
The soaring sea gulls
Against a summer blue sky
Gliding on the breeze.
By Russell Sills, Grade 9
 Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
`'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door Only this, and nothing more.'
 Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore Nameless here for evermore.
 Tercets are any three lines of poetry, whether as a stanza or
as a poem, rhymed or unrhymed, metered or unmetered. The
haiku is a tercet poem.
 Another common tercet is:
 Enclosed tercet- a triplet that rhymes "aba".
 I am a yellow dog
who wishes he was
a purple-spotted frog.
 Quatrains are four line stanzas of any kind, rhymed,
metered, or otherwise.
 Alternating Quatrain- a four line stanza rhyming “____."
 The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.
 Envelope Stanza- a quatrain with the rhyme scheme “____”
 The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn1qxrM1XY0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmLE2bliXCI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuAbGJBvIVY