Form: The Shape of Poetry
True-False
Write T if the statement is true or F if it is false.
__t___ 1. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, many poets
have rejected regular patterns in favor of poems
that appear more free and spontaneous.
__t___ 2. Blank verse is one of the most common closed forms of
English poetry.
__f___ 3. Shakespeare used blank verse extensively in his long
epic Paradise Lost.
__t___ 4. Blank verse sounds like normal speech.
__t___ 5. Couplets have been featured in English poetry ever
since Chaucer used them in the fourteenth century.
__t___ 6. The heroic couplet was used by prominent poets in
the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Neoclassical
age of English literature.
__f___ 7. The tercet is the most common and adaptable stanzaic
building block of English poetry.
__t___ 8. Like couplets and tercets, quatrains may be written in
any line length and meter.
__t___ 9. The sonnet is one of the most popular and durable
closed poetic forms.
__t__ 10. The ballad is one of the oldest closed forms in English
poetry.
__f__ 11. The lyric has a more variable stanzaic form than the
ode.
__t__ 12. According to Japanese tradition, the subject of the
haiku is derived from nature.
__t__ 13. The ode is the closed form most closely related, in
spirit, to open-form poetry because of its freedom
and variability.
__f__ 14. Open-form poetry relies on traditional patterns of
organization to produce order.
__t__ 15. The Chinese have been producing visual poetry for
housands of years.
Matching
Write the letter of the correct response.
__k___1. open-form poetry
__o___2. closed-form poetry
__c___3. line
__q___4. stanza
__g___5. blank verse
__i___6. couplet
__m___7. heroic couplet
__e___8. tercel
__h___9. quatrain
__b__10. Italian sonnet
__j__11. English sonnet
__t__12. ballad
__l__13. lyric
__s__14. common measure
__p__15. haiku
__n__16. epigram
__r__17. limerick
__f__18. free verse
__d__19. visual poetry
__a__20. epitaph
A. lines composed to commemorate
a death
B. popularized by Petrarch in the
fourteenth century
C. poetic equivalent of a prose
sentence
D. poetry that takes a recognizable
shape on the page
E. a three-line stanza
F. former term for open-form poetry
G. unrhymed iambic pentameter
H. a four-line stanza
I. the shortest distinct closed
form, a pair of lines
J. developed by Shakespeare in the
sixteenth century
K. has a structure and technique
that appears to be free and
spontaneous
L. originally designed to be sung
M. the iambic pentameter couplet
N. a short, witty poem often in
couplets and making a satiric
point
O. written in specific and
traditional patterns
P. has three lines and a total of
seventeen syllables
Q. poetic analogue of the prose
paragraph
R. a comic and usually bawdy fiveline poem
S. hymnal stanza frequently used by
Emily Dickinson
T. consists of quatrains with
alternating lines of iambic
tetrameter and iambic trimeter