Ella writes:

In Part I , I gave some basic strategies to find ideas for poetry.  This article is obliquely about finding a form for ideas, though in essence, it is merely a list of a few forms with a variety of examples and random observations on each.  (Descriptions of each form and definitions can be found in my glossary.)

Blank verse.

Examples:  Shakespeare’s plays; Tintern Abbey (Wordsworth); Ulysses (Tennyson); ‘Out, Out—’ (Robert Frost); Fitzgerald’s Aeneid.

Blank verse tends to be used for narrative poetry, often dramatic monologues.  It is particularly flexible, since it is not set into stanzas of particular length:  It can be broken between lines or mid-line, wherever one would naturally break between paragraphs of prose (c.f. Tintern Abbey).  The lack of rhyme leaves more room for the poet to focus on other sound devices.  I have not used it much because I write mostly lyric poetry.

English sonnet.

Examples:  ‘Shall I compare…,’ ‘When to the sessions…’ and other sonnets by Shakespeare; ‘My love is like to ice…’ (Spenser); ‘Why did I laugh…’ (Keats); ‘Thou in whose sword-great story…’ (E. E. Cummings).

The sonnet is often associated with love, though it has been used for many other subjects as well—particularly solemn themes such as literature, theology, or death.  It is generally better for lyric than for narrative poetry, especially because it is only fourteen lines.  Although they need not always be strictly separated, the three quatrains can describe three facets of the subject, and the couplet can summarise it.  The specific rhyme scheme makes it more challenging than blank verse, but also more rewarding.  I like the length and quatrain-couplet structure and have written more than twenty in the past three years.  Since I avoid writing love poetry, I use the form for my own serious thoughts.

Many of my favourite sonnets are actually in the Italian form, which is harder to write.  It seems to me, though, to be less often about love than the English sonnet.  A few good examples:  ‘Batter my heart…’ (Donne); On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer (Keats); ‘Thou art indeed just…’ (Hopkins); Design (Robert Frost).

Ballad stanza.

Examples:  Sir Patrick Spens; ‘Get up and Bar the Door’; To Lucasta (Richard Lovelace); To the Virgins (Robert Herrick); The Divine Image (Blake); A Red, Red Rose (Burns); The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge); Joy to the World, O God Our Help in Ages Past (Isaac Watts); Ballad of the Goodly Fere (Ezra Pound); The Darkling Thrush (Thomas Hardy); ‘I sit beside the fire…,’ ‘An Elven-maid there was…’ (J. R. R. Tolkien).

As the name implies, the ballad stanza is often used for ballads, as well as other traditional literature such as nursery rhymes (e.g. ‘Mary had a little lamb’).  It is also used for hymns, in which case it is called common metre (C.M.).  However, the form is good for nearly any kind of poem, light or serious.  Less confining than the sonnet, it has a stronger structure than blank verse while still being nearly as flexible: one can concatenate any number of quatrains into one poem.  I have used the form for two ballads of sorts (of which one is largely facetious), lyric poetry, elegies in my novel, and riddles.

Terza rima.

Examples:  Ode to the West Wind (Shelley); Acquainted With the Night (Robert Frost); Light on Water (our own Miss Russell); Terza Rima for Donna Prima (our own Miss Roorda).

Terza rima, like the ballad stanza, is flexible in length, but its sets of three rhymes make it more difficult than the ballad stanza or the sonnet.  It is relatively rare in English poetry and does not seem to have any particular stylistic associations.  Dr. Paul Fussell theorises in Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (p. 132), ‘The failure of terza rima to establish a tradition in English… suggests that stanzas of even- rather than odd-numbered lines are those that appeal most naturally to the Anglo-Saxon sensibility.’ I have written only two poems in terza rima, one for the challenge and one in reply to Dante, and will likely not use it again soon.

Hendecasyllabic.

The only good English example that I have found is Frost’s For Once, Then, Something.  (Tennyson tries to preserve some of the quantitative aspect of the metre in his Hendecasyllabics, with rather awkward result.)

Hendecasyllabic verse, originally used in Greek and Latin, is even more rare in English than terza rima.  It often sounds similar to blank verse with a spondaic substitution in the second foot and an extra final syllable.  In the little that I have used it, I have found that it seems to support alliteration unusually well: the lines are long enough to hold four or five main stresses, with room for all the small intermediate words necessary in modern English.  Also, lines with unstressed final syllables sound like many in Old English poetry.  Working along these intensions, I have tried to use as much native English diction as possible (avoiding Latinate words), and, I think, the bit that I have written so far sounds paradoxically natural.

And that is all for now.