A Beginner’s Guide To The Different Types of Poems

Sestina

Here’s another old poetic form, in this case coming out of 12th-century Provence. Like the villanelle, it has a lot of repetition, but unlike the villanelle, sestinas don’t have to rhyme. The sestina has six stanzas of six lines each, and a closing stanza of three lines. The six words that end the lines of the first stanza get repeated at the line endings of each of the remaining stanzas, and all six words appear in the poem’s final three lines. Here is a great description of the order these six words should appear in.

Elizabeth Bishop, “Sestina.”

Alberto Alvaro Rios, “Nani“

Acrostic

Here is a fun form: spell out a name, word, or phrase with the first letter of each line of your poem. You can write a love poem using the name of your beloved this way!

Edgar Allan Poe, “An Acrostic.”

Sathya Narayana, “Nuggets“

Ekphrastic Poetry

This type of poem doesn’t have particular rules for form: unlike the forms above, you can write it however you like. What it is, instead, is a poem about a work of art: a painting, a statue, perhaps a photograph. It’s art about art, written in response to visual art that inspires the poet.

Tyehimba Jess, “Hagar in the Wilderness.”

Rebecca Wolff, “Ekphrastic.”

concrete POetry

Concrete poetry, or shape poetry, or visual poetry, is meant to look a particular way on the page: it’s written to form a particular image or shape that enhances the poem’s meaning. In its cheesy form, a concrete poem might be a love poem written in the shape of a heart. But here are some better examples:

May Swenson, “Women.” This poem is about how women are expected be “pedestals moving to the motions of men,” and the poem itself illustrates the swaying women are supposed to do at the will of men.

George Herbert, “Altar.”

Elegy

Like ekphrastic poetry above, this type of poem doesn’t have to fit a particular form; instead, it’s defined by its subject, which is death. An elegy is a poem of mourning, often for a particular person, but it can be about a group of people or about a broader sense of loss. Elegies often move from mourning toward consolation.

Walt Whitman, “O Captain, My Captain.”

Mary Jo Bangs, “You Were You Are Elegy.”

Kwame Dawes, “Requiem.”

Epigram

Want to write something short? Try your hand at an epigram. All you have to do is be brilliant and witty in a few lines — easy! Epigrams don’t have to be poems, but they often are. They are short and witty, often satirical, and have a surprising and funny ending.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Epigram“

Emily Dickinson, “‘Faith’ is a Fine Invention“

Limerick

On the subject of funny poems, next is the limerick. You’re probably familiar with the limerick form, even if you don’t get the details of it, because its sound is so distinctive: two longer lines, two short ones, and a closing longer line that makes a joke, often a ribald one. If you want the technical details, here you go: limericks have a rhyme scheme of AABBA and use anapestic meter, with three feet in the longer lines and two in the shorter.

Ballad

If you want to read a story or tell a story in a poem, the ballad is for you. It’s an old, traditional form that used to be passed down orally from one generation to the next. Ballads, if you want to follow the rules of the form strictly, are written in quatrains, groups of four lines, and have a rhyme scheme of ABAB or ABCB. The lines alternate between having eight syllables and six syllables. But the ballad is a loose enough form that you can make of it whatever you want.

Anonymous, “Barbara Allen.” Here’s the first stanza:

In Scarlet town, where I was born,
There was a fair maid dwellin’,
Made every youth cry Well-a-way!
Her name was Barbara Allen.

Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabel Lee.”

epitaph

The epitaph is like the elegy, only shorter. It’s the kind of poem that might appear on a gravestone, although it doesn’t have to. It’s brief and it pays tribute to a person who has passed away or commemorates some other loss.

Robert Herrick, “Upon a Child That Died”

Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Epitaph“

Tanka

The tanka (which means “short poem”) is a Japanese form that is five lines. The first and third lines have five syllables (in the English version of the form) and the other lines have seven syllables each. The subject of the poem can be nature, as it generally is for haiku, but this isn’t required.

Sadakichi Hartmann, “Tanka“

Philip Appleman, “Three Haiku, Two Tanka.”

Ode

An ode is simply a poem address to a particular person, event, or thing. It’s often meant to praise or glorify its subject. The ode as a form comes from ancient Greece and there are various ode types available, but basically if you are addressing something/someone directly, you are writing an ode.

Pablo Neruda, “Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market.” Here is how the poem begins:

Here,
among the market vegetables,
this torpedo
from the ocean
depths,
a missile
that swam,
now
lying in front of me
dead.

Phillis Wheatley, “Ode to Neptune.”

Free Verse

This is the form of poetry where you can do whatever you want! There are no rules! You don’t use regular patterns of rhythm or rhyme, don’t need lines of any particular length, or stanzas of a particular number of lines. This is both liberating and terrifying. Yes, you can do whatever you want…which means it can be hard to know where to start. But give it a try and enjoy the freedom of it!

Nikki Giovanni, “Winter Poem“

Langston Hughes, “Theme for English B.”

This is a fairly lengthy list but it’s only just the beginning when it comes to understanding and appreciating different types of poems. If you want to learn more, I highly recommend the Poetry Foundation website. Or you can read more Book Riot articles on the subject: Click here for an introduction to how to read poetry. To explore more articles on poetry, click here. Have fun!