Features of poetic texts

General features:

• high degree of verbal pattering or design (in verses and often first person)

• musical quality, careful crafting of sound patterns

• high density, shortness/brevity

• Deviation from everyday language (metre, rhyme, rhetorical figures) → literariness → Can challenge how we look at subject

• foregrounding of acoustic potential of language

• specific typographical presentation: lines and stanzas

Focus on typographical representation → Poem dependant on lines and verses

Focus on verse and stanza forms

→ Important stanzas are identified on basis of number of lines of verse they conatin

• Couplet: paired line of verse

  • paired line of verse written in iambic pentameter: heroic couplet (popular in 17th century)

• Tercet: three lines o verse

• Quatrain: four lines of verse

• Quintet: five lines of verse

• Sestet: six lines of verse

• Septet: seven lines of verse

• Octet: eight lines of verse

Important stanza forms

• stichich verse: no stanzaic structure, continous sequence of lines of roughly the same length

• blank verse: non-rhyming iambic pentameter, often stichich (Shakespeare)

• ballad stanza: consists of quatrains, rhyming abcb, iambic tetrameter alternates with iambic trimeter, often used in long, narrative poems

• limerick: quintet, 2 lines trimeter (trochee followed by 2 anapests), 2 lines anapestic dimeter, 1 line trimeter (trochee followed by 2 anapests), used for nonsense verse

• rhyme royal: septet, iambic pentameter, rhyming ababbcc

• ottava rima: octet, usually iambic, rhyming abababcc

• spenserian stanza: nine lines, first eight lines pentameter, final line hexametter, rhyming ababbcbcc

• haiku: very short poem, three lines and seventeen sylllables

Additional features:

• often focus on interiority (feelings and experience of speaker), relative unimportance of external action

• often dereferentialized utternaces: no references to time and space