What exactly is it that makes a poem different, for example, to a piece of prose? Or song lyrics, even?

The truth is that when we get down to it poetry isn’t all that easy to pin down. Even poets themselves disagree about what constitutes a poem. What chance then do our struggling students have?

Luckily, there are some broad, general characteristics that can be agreed upon. In this article, we will look at these common features of poetry and how we can best instil an understanding of these in our students.

COMMON FEATURES OF POETRY

● It looks like a poem – if it looks like a poem and it reads like a poem, then the chances are pretty good that it is, indeed, a poem. Poetry comes in lines, some of which are full sentences, but many of which are not. Also, usually, these lines don’t run out to the margins consistently, like in, say, a novel. All this gives poetry a distinctive and recognisable look on the page.

● It often has some underlying form holding things together – while this isn’t always true (in some free verse, for example) a lot of poetry conforms to a prescribed structure such as in a sonnet, a haiku etc.

● It uses imagery – if the poet is worth his or her salt, they’ll endeavour to create images in the reader’s mind using lots of sensory details and figurative language.

● It has a certain musicality – we could be forgiven for thinking that poetry’s natural incarnation is the written word and its habitat the page, but the printed word is not where poetry’s origins lie. The earliest poems were composed orally and committed to memory. We can still see the importance the sound of language plays when we read poems out loud. We can see it too in the attention paid to musical devices that are incorporated into the poem. Devices such as alliteration, assonance, and rhyme, for example. We will look at many of these later in this article.

Source: https://www.literacyideas.com/elements-of-poetry/

Poetry key terms

• Cadence – The patterning of rhythm in natural speech, or in poetry without a distinct meter.

• Meter – The rhythmical pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse.

• Refrain – A phrase or line repeated at intervals within a poem, especially at the end of a stanza.

• Rhyme – The repetition of syllables, typically at the end of a verse line. Rhymed words conventionally share all sounds following the word’s last stressed syllable.

• Stanza – a group of lines forming the basic recurring metrical unit in a poem; a verse

• Tone – The poet’s attitude toward the poem’s speaker, reader, and subject matter, as interpreted by the reader.

• writing arranged with a metrical rhythm, typically having a rhyme

• Verse – writing arranged with a metrical rhythm, typically having a rhyme

Inauguration Poem

Poetry Assessment