Sonnet

Sonnet is a lyric form that has been popular since the Italian poet Petrarch perfected it. Sonnets have written in groups, called, naturally enough, sonnet sequences. It is composed of fourteen iambic pentameter lines.

Two kinds of Sonnet
Italian or Miltonic and the Shakespearean
Italian form maybe divided into an octet (the first eight lines) and a sestet (the remaining six lies) and the final couplet, which is often an epigrammatic summary of the idea of the sonnet.
Shakespearean sonnet rhymes a b a b, c d c d, e f e f, g g .

Stanza Forms

Stanza Forms
Stanza• is really a thought unit that corresponds to a paragraph in prose. There are a number of standard stanza forms, composed of a certain number of lines of a definite number of feet, and a definite pattern of rhyme.
Blank verse
• is the least complex unit. It is not exactly a stanza form because it based on the single line, any number of which maybe used to make up a poem.
• Blank verse line is of iambic pentameter.
• Blank verse does not rhyme. This stanza form used in long poems.

Heroic couplet consists of two rhyming lines of iambic pentameter.
Ballad stanza is a stanza of four lines; the first and third are tetrameter, the second and fourth are trimester. Extra-unaccented syllables are frequent. The second and fourth lines rhyme, the first and third do not.
Rhyme Royal is a stanza of seven iambic pentameter lines with definite rhyme scheme. In indicating rhyme scheme here and in other stanza forms we use this system: lines that rhyme with each other are given identical letters – all lines that rhyme with the first rhyming line are lettered a, with the second rhyming line, b, etc. The rhyme scheme of rhyme royal is a b a b b c c.
Ottava rima is consists of eight iambic pentameter lines rhyming a b a b a b cc.
Spenserian stanza is made up of nine lines – the first eight in iambic pentameter, the last of iambic hexameter (that is, of six iambic feet).
Sonnet is a lyric form that has been popular since the Italian poet Petrarch perfected it. Sonnets have written in groups, called, naturally enough, sonnet sequences. It is composed of fourteen iambic pentameter lines.
Terza Rima consists of stanzas of three iambic pentameter lines each (tercets). Each linked to the next by the rhyme scheme, which is: a b a, b c b, c d c, d e d, etc.
Free Verse is different from any of the forms previously mentioned: it has no rhyme and it follows no regular meter. Its lines may be, an often are, of varying length.

Some Elements of Poetry

Some Elements of Poetry
Rhyme
• refers to the correspondence of some of the sounds of words. The words rate ate, and late rhyme, as do scope, lope, and grope.
In most rhyming poetry, the rhyming words come at the ends of lines:


Rhythm and meter
• are closely allied characteristics or poetry.
• Rhythm refers to the flow of sounds, their rise and fall, their accents, and pauses.
Meter• is regularized, patterned rhythm. Notice how in this line of Words-worth’s


It is possible to accent alternate syllables so that the line maybe read (with some exaggeration, of course) as,


Or, take this line of Ben Jonson’s:


This maybe read as,


-Each of these groups called a foot. A foot must contain at least one accented syllable. The first example, with the accented syllable following the unaccented one, is an iambic foot. The second, which has the accented syllable coming first, is a trochaic foot.

Monometer is a line with one foot.
Dimeter is a line with two feet.
Trimeter is a line with four feet.
Tetrameter is a line with four feet.
Pentameter is a line with five feet.
Hexameter is a line with six feet.

Melody
Alliteration – means the repetition for effect of initial vowels or consonants.
Onomatopoeia – is a long word that means simply the imitation in words of natural sounds.
Assonance – refers to the correspondence of vowel sounds. It differs from rhyme in that it does not have identical consonant sounds following the identical vowels.

Poetry

Poetry
Kinds of Poetry
Lyric Poetry• is the most popular or the most familiar kind of poetry.
• It is closest to music, the ancient lyrics having been sung to the accompaniment of the lyre, whence its name.
• It is an expression of the poet’s own feeling—about love, nature, man or woman—in short about almost subject which may move her or him.
• Lyric is generally a short poem.
• Shakespeare, Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and more recently, William Butler Yeats are some of the great lyricists in English literature.
Ode• is a special kind of lyric, written in a dignified and elevated style.
Elegy• is a lament on the death of a person.
• The great elegies, however, go further than to mourn death. They often use the death of a person as a starting point from which they may proceed to a discussion of such matters as the meaning of death, life, and even the universe.
Narrative Poetry
• Like narrative prose, tells a story.
Epic
• An epic is a long narrative, usually in verse, dealing usually with the fabulous adventures of a national or mythological hero.
• Great Epics are: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Scandinavian eddas, the Tetonic sagas, and Anglo-Saxon Beowulf.
Ballad• is a short narrative poem, telling an actual folk story or a folk-like story in verse form.
• “The Twa Corbies” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well” are the popular folk ballads. And “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” by Oscar Wilde and Kipling’s “A Ballad of East and West” are the modern literary ballads.

Drama

Drama• Which either may be written in poetry or in prose, is a literary form which is intended primarily for enactment on a stage. An individual dramatic work was known as a play.
• The great plays of the past have been partially or entirely verse, but the tendency among modern dramatists has been to write in prose.
• A play usually divided into a number of acts; each act maybe divided into scenes.
• Classical plays are usually either tragedies or comedies.
• A tragedy is play with a great, noble hero who possesses some major flaw of character. The plot often turns on an act committed by the hero against the gods or the moral order, for which he is duly punished.

Forms of Non-Fiction

Forms of Non-Fiction
Essay• is a more or less brief literary work dealing with one main topic.
• Personal Essay is an exposition of one’s personal reaction to a person, thing, or event.
• Formal Essay it may be more objective in its approach to its subject matter.
• The first essays in English wee written by Francis Bacon.
• Addison, Steele, De Quincey, Lamb, Carlyle, Thomas Huxley are the other famous English essayists. In America, we have Emerson, Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, H.L. Mencken, Christopher Morley, and Edmund Wilson.

Biography• comes from the two Greek words: bios meaning life, and graphein, meaning to write.
• It means biography means, “to write of life.”
• Biographies are the life stories of people, usually famous people, or people who have contributed to the world.

Fiction

Fiction
Novel
• is the most popular form of writing today.
• It deals with a set of characters, characters are related by the action of the story, or the plot; and the emphasis of the novel may be on the events of the plot, or on the main character, the hero or heroine of the story, or upon the society of people with the novel treats.
• The length of a novel may vary from perhaps two hundred pages as in the case of Ethan Frome, to one thousand pages, as in the case of War and Peace.
• Daniel Defoe author of Robinson Crusoe was the first great novelist in English.

Short Story• As its name implies, is short-perhaps two or three pages, sometimes fifty pages.
• The “shortness,” however, is less a matter of absolute brevity than it is of being more limited in scope, and more compact in theme, than the novel.
• A master of the short story was Edgar Allan Poe, said that it should not contain a single word that was not absolutely necessary and appropriate to the whole.
• Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ring Lardner, and Ernest Hemingway are the great writers of short stories.