a poem that tells a story and was traditionally set to music. Usually follows a form of rhymed (abcb) quatrains alternating four-stress and three-stress lines.

a poem with regular metrical but unrhymed lines, almost always in iambic pentameter.

a short poem consisting of five, usually unrhymed lines containing, respectively, two, four, six, eight, and two syllables. Cinquains may be paired and manipulated to create longer forms. For example, the mirror cinquain has lines of syllables 2, 4, 6, 8, 2, 2, 8, 6, 4, 2.  Cinquains are often used in teaching schoolchildren early forms of poetry.

Features intimate and personal revelations, often drawing on the poet's own experiences, emotions, and struggles.

Responds to or describes a work of visual art, capturing the essence of a painting, sculpture, or other visual medium through words.

a lengthy narrative poem, typically set in the far past, involving heroic and extraordinary adventures and dealings of people with gods or other superhuman forces.

poetry that follows natural speech patterns, but does not rhyme or follow a regular meter

A poetic form with rhyming couplets and a repeating refrain, often exploring themes of love, loss, and longing. It has its roots in Arabic and Persian poetry.

a short poem of three lines with five, seven, and five syllables respectively. While there are several schools of Haiku writing, the most faithful to the original will use some aspect of the natural world as its subject, and will not contain any personal references to the writer/observer.

a poem that is typically humorous and bawdy, written in five-line, predominantly anapestic trimeter with a strict rhyme scheme of AABBA, in which the first, second and fifth lines rhyme, while the third and fourth lines are shorter and share a different rhyme.

a poem that expresses personal feelings or emotions, typically written in first person. There are several general groupings of lyric poetry, including elegies, odes and sonnets.

a mixture of two or more forms of poetry

a poem containing two or more words that repeat the same or similar sounds in the final syllable, usually placed at the end of lines placed so they echo each other

a poem of fourteen lines using any of a number of formal rhyme schemes, typically containing ten syllables per line, traditionally using iambic pentameter. A sonnet must contain a turning point (or, volta), in which the thread of the theme changes direction. There are three main sorts of sonnet: Italian (or, Petrarchan), Shakesperean, and Spenserian; each of these has a different rhyme scheme. The Italian rhymes ABBAABBA CDCDCD or ABBAABBA CDECDE; the Shakespearean uses ABAB CDCD EFEF GG; the Spenserian ABAB BCBC CDCD EE.

a poem translated from another language