Is This a Poem?: What makes a poem, and how YOU can write one

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It’s hard to imagine what an overfilled brain looks like, but when you compare it to a jar of marbles that’s already spilling over, the reader can envision it much more clearly.

Although Shel Silverstein (1930-1999) wrote poetry for young children, adults can glean many lessons from his pieces. This style of poetry may not follow any rules at all or it might use small elements of traditional forms of poetry. One of the most noteworthy aspects of poetry as an art form is its usage of phonetic, mnemonic, and imagery-based techniques to enhance the poem’s quality.

Lay your sleeping head, my love …’: so begins this, one of the tenderest, and most honest and beautiful, love poems in all of twentieth-century literature. Repetition is used both for decoration, as is the case when repeating the same vowel or consonant sound several times in a line, and for technical purposes. Comparing her to such a striking natural scene suggests he finds her very beautiful, perhaps even sparkling like the stars he refers to and therefore standing out from other people.

While these goals might seem fairly dissonant at first glance, the main thing they have in common is that they can potentially be achieved in a small number of words through the use of poetic language. To My Dear and Loving Husband" by Anne Bradstreet Thy love is such I can no way repay; The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray. In this stanza, she demonstrates several poetic techniques, like enjambment, imagery, rhyme, and more. Free Verse: This type of poetry utilizes the freedom of not following any particular structure or rhyme scheme such as other types poems.

Rebecca Hazelton isn’t writing about her soulmate, and she’s aware of that — but that doesn’t make the love they share any less special. The lines form three quatrains , which are sets of four lines, and the sonnet ends with a closing rhyming couplet. We often use the terms interchangeably, but the term “poetry” encompasses many more elements than the finished product does. B. Yeats, Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickinson, Roald Dahl, Charles Causley, Eleanor Farjeon, Philip Larkin and many more.