Literary Types
Introduction to Poetry
Speaker and Tone
 Speaker and Tone
 The speaker of a poem is the character who speaks in, or
narrates, the poem – the voice assumed by the writer.
 The speaker and the writer are NOT necessarily the same
person. Since the speaker is the voice of the poem, the voice
sets the tone.
 Tone is the emotional attitude toward the reader or toward
the subject implied by a poem.
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Examples of tone
 Ironic
 Playful
 Serious
 Sarcastic
Setting and Context
 Setting and Context
 The setting of a literary work is the time and
place in which it occurs, together with all the
details used to create a sense of a particular time
and place.
 Poets often create setting using sensory
details.
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Sensory details include sight, sound, touch, smell,
and taste.
 Writers employ the five senses to engage a reader's
interest.
Figurative Language
 Figurative Language is writing or speech that is
meant to be understood imaginatively instead of
literally.
 A metaphor is a comparison in which one thing is
written about as if it were another.
 A simile is a comparison that uses like or as.
 Personification is a figure of speech in which an
animal, a thing, a force of nature, or an idea is described
as if it were human or is given human qualities.
Sight and Sound
 Sight and Sound
 Poetry uses descriptive language, or imagery, to create a
vivid picture in the mind of the reader and to appeal to
the senses-primary sight but also sound, touch, taste,
and smell.
 The pattern of beats, or stresses, in a line of poetry is
called rhythm. Rhythm can be regular or irregular. A
regular rhythmic pattern is called a meter.
Rhyme
 Rhyme
 Some forms of poetry use the repetition of sounds at the
ends of words to create rhyme, as in day and away.
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Internal rhyme is rhyme that occurs within lines
End rhyme is rhyme that occurs at the ends of lines
Slant rhyme is the use of words that do not rhyme exactly but
have a similar sound, as in rave and rove or rot and rock (also
known as consonance and/or assonance).
Rhyme scheme is the pattern of end rhyme designated by
assigning a different letter of the alphabet to each rhyme
(ababcdcd)
Structure and Form
 Structure
 Whereas stores and essays are divided into paragraphs, poems
can be divided into stanzas, or groups of lines.
 The type of stanza is determined by the number of lines:
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Couplet: two lines
Tercet/Triplet: three lines
Quatrain: four lines
Quintet/Quintain: five lines
Sestet: six lines
Septet: seven lines
Octave: eight lines
 Form
 A single poem may contain numerous recognizable elements.
Before you read…
 Be sure