This folder has content about poetry, the craft of composing language where sound, rhythm, image, and structure carry meaning alongside — or instead of — propositional content. Poetry is the practice of writing in which the material qualities of language (its cadence, its breaks, its silences) are themselves part of what is said.
Poetry is distinguished from prose not by the presence of meter or rhyme but by the writer’s deliberate attention to the line as a unit of composition. Where prose flows to the margin, poetry breaks — and the break is meaning.
The craft of poetry involves three interlocking concerns:
- Sound — prosody, meter, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance. Poetry is language organized for the ear as much as the eye.
- Structure — the line break, the stanza, the volta, and fixed forms (sonnet, villanelle, ghazal, pantoum, haiku) that constrain and enable expression.
- Figuration — metaphor, simile, and imagery. Poetry’s figurative language connects domains that don’t obviously belong together, creating meaning through the surprise of the connection.
The curricula below develop these concerns in sequence: line and break first, then sound and meter, then fixed forms. The terms provide the vocabulary for analyzing and discussing craft decisions.