Form

Apart from a poem’s internal structure—organization of ideas, images, metaphors, etc.—it also has an “external” structure, or form. When you look at the poem, how does it look? Is it one long strip of lines, or is it broken into stanzas? (A stanza, as you know, is a group of lines that go together.) Are the stanzas different in length or the same? Are the stanzas connected with the same metrical pattern, or is the meter different in different stanzas? These questions may help you to discover the form of the poem.

When no special form is visible, the lines merely flow one into the other with no stanzas to break them apart, we can reform to it as continuous form, for example “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime,” by William Carlos Williams. In Arp & Johnson’s glossary continuous form is described as “That form of a poem in which the lines follow each other without formal grouping, the only breaks being dictated by units of meaning” (p. 422). Similar to continuous form is free verse. This type of form is also without any formal grouping. Arp & Johnson explains it as “Nonmetrical poetry in which the basic rhythmic unit is the line, and in which pauses, line breaks, and formal patterns develop organically from the requirements of the individual poem rather than from established forms” (p. 424). In other words, there are no infringements made on the poem – no specific rhythmic or stanza requirements.

Often poems are structured into stanzas. Arp & Johnson explains that in “stanzaic form the poet writes in a series of stanzas; that is, repeated units having the same number of lines, usually the same metrical pattern, and often an identical rhyme scheme” (p. 244). While modern poetry may make use of stanzaic form, the do not always exhibit precise stanzas with specific metrical patterns or identical rhyme scheme. Modern poets tend to experiment more with the older forms. Nonetheless, it is still necessary to know the basic types of stanzas. Following are some types of stanzas:

Couplet: Two successive lines, usually in the same meter, and often linked by rhyme.

Tercet: A three line stanza.

Quatrain: A four-line stanza. The quatrain can sometimes be part four-line division within a sonnet and identifiable through its rhyme scheme.

Sestet: A six-line stanza. The sestet can also be part of an Italian sonnet – the last six lines.

Octave: An eight-line stanza. The first eight lines of an Italian sonnet is often an octave.

A Fixed form is a traditional pattern that applies to whole poem. The most common fixed form in English poetry is the sonnet, which is a poem that contains exactly fourteen lines and usually in iambic pentameter. There are three types of fixed forms, namely the Italian (or Petrarchan sonnet), the English (or Shakespearean sonnet) and the Spenserian sonnet. The diagram below depicts these sonnets with their individual rhyme schemes and stanzaic structures.

Jon Stalworthy. 1983. “Versification” p. 1416. (In The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3rd Edition.)

While many modern poets use the sonnet, they often do not stick to the fixed tradition. An example is “Harlem Hopscotch” by Maya Angelou.

The basic forms outlined above is adequate for this course; however, for those of you interested in more types of forms in poetry, refer to the essay “Versification” (p. 1403-1422) by Jon Stallworthy in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3rd Edition, specifically the part on “Form” (p. 1431-1422).