105 Types of Poetry Forms Challenge

April 6, 2023

105 Types of Poetry Forms Challenge:

Write one poem per day of each of the below types (105 days total):

ABC/Abecedarian: A poem that has five lines and creates a mood, picture, or feeling. Lines 1 through 4 are made up of words, phrases, or clauses while the first word of each line is in alphabetical order. Line 5 is one sentence long and begins with any letter. Example: Aimee Nezhukumatathil's “Hummingbird.”
Acrostic: Poetry that contains certain letters, usually the first in each line form a word or message when read in a sequence. Example: Edgar Allan Poe's “A Valentine.”
Aisling: An Irish dream poem in which Ireland appears to the poet personified as a woman. Example: “Paul Muldoon's Aisling.”
Ars poetica: A poem about poetry, examining the role of poets, poets’ relationships to the poem, and the act of writing.
Aubade: a dawn song that greets the morning while lamenting the end of the night, often concerning the parting of lovers.
Ballad: A plot-driven song or poem with one or more characters that tells a story similar to a folk tale or legend which often has a repeated refrain. It's often constructed in quatrain stanzas. Read more about ballads.
Ballade: Poetry which has three main stanzas of seven, eight or ten lines and a shorter final stanza (envoi) of four or five. All stanzas end with the same one-line refrain. This form was popular in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France.
Bhakti poetry: A form that began in India in the sixth century and traditionally celebrates love for and devotion to specific Hindi gods.
Blank verse: A poem written in unrhymed iambic pentameter and is often unobtrusive. The most common iambic pentameter form often resembles the rhythms of speech. Example: Alfred Tennyson's “Ulysses.”
Bio: A poem written about one self's life, personality traits, and ambitions. Example: Jean Ingelow's “One Morning, Oh! So Early.”
Blues poem: A form that stems from the African American oral tradition and the musical tradition of the blues.
Burlesque: Poetry that treats a serious subject as humor. Example: E. E. Cummings's “O Distinct.”
Canzone: Medieval Italian lyric style poetry with five or six stanzas and a shorter ending stanza. Literally “song” in Italian, the canzone is a lyric poem originating in medieval Italy and France and usually consisting of hendecasyllabic lines with end-rhyme. Early versions include Petrarch’s five to six-line stanzas plus an envoi, as well as Dante’s modification: five twelve-line stanzas with repeated end words, finished by a five-line envoi. The canzone influenced the development of the sonnet and later writers such as James Merrill, W.H. Auden, and Ezra Pound took up the form. See Daryl Hine’s “Canzone” and “About the Canzone,” by John Hollander.
Carol: A hymn or poem often sung by a group, with an individual taking the changing stanzas and the group taking the burden or refrain. See Robert Southwell’s “The Burning Babe.” Many traditional Christmas songs are carols, such as “I Saw Three Ships” and “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”
Carpe diem: Latin expression that means 'seize the day.' Carpe diem poems have a theme of living for today.
Cento: A form also known as a collage poem and composed entirely of lines from poems by other poets.
Cinquain: A poem or stanza, also known as a quintain or quintet, composed of five lines. Line 1 has one word (the title). Line 2 has two words that describe the title. Line 3 has three words that tell the action. Line 4 has four words that express the feeling, and line 5 has one word that recalls the title. Read more about cinquain poetry.
Classicism: Poetry which holds the principles and ideals of beauty that are characteristic of Greek and Roman art, architecture, and literature.
Clerihew: a whimsical, skewed quatrain poem–– two rhyming couplets (aabb) of unequal length about a person’s biography.
Concrete: Also known as “size poetry” or “pattern poetry.” Concrete poetry uses typographical arrangements to display an element of the poem. This can either be through re-arrangement of letters of a word or by arranging the words as a shape. Read more about concrete poetry.
Contrapuntal: a poetic form that interweaves two or more poems to create a single poem that can be read in multiple ways depending on how the poem is designed on the page.
Couplet: This type of poem is two lines which may be rhymed or unrhymed. Example: Walt Whitman's “To You.”
Dirge: A song of grief, a lament that commemorates the dead.
Doha: A form in Hindi and Urdu verse that consists of rhyming couplets made up of twenty-four syllables each.
Dramatic monologue: This poem, also known as a persona poem, is a type of poem that's spoken to a listener in which the poet assumes the voice of another person, fictional character, or identity. The speaker addresses a specific topic while the listener unwittingly reveals details about him/herself. See an example here.
Duplex: A form composed of seven couplets, nine to eleven syllables per line, the second line of each couplet is echoed in the first line of the following couplet, and the first line of the poem is also echoed in its last.
Eclogue: A short pastoral poem, traditionally where shepherds converse over rural life, that has evolved to be a poem in dialogue with the climate and environmental issues derived from civilization.
Elegy: A sad and thoughtful poem about the death of an individual. Example: Gary R. Hess's “1983.”
Elliptical poetry: Poetry that is oblique and without prosaic information or a logical sequence of meaning.
Epic: An extensive, serious poem that tells the story of a heroic figure or figures. An epic is a long, often book-length, narrative in verse form that retells the heroic journey of a single person or group of persons.
Epigram: A very short, ironic, and witty poem usually written as a brief couplet or quatrain. The term is derived from the Greek “epigramma,” meaning inscription.
Epitaph: A commemorative inscription on a tomb or mortuary monument written to praise the deceased. Example: Ben Jonson's “On My First Sonne.”
Epistolary poem: Also known as an epistle, a poem of direct address that reads as a letter.
Erasure poem: a form of found poetry wherein a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or otherwise obscures a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new work from what remains.
Epithalamium (Epithalamion): A poem written in honor of the bride and groom. See an example here.
Fable: A story in prose or verse that often arrives at a moral.
Found poem: Poetry created by taking words, phrases, and passages from other sources and re-framing them by adding spaces or lines, or by altering the text with additions or subtractions.
Fragment: A part of a larger work, or a poem made to appear discontinuous or incomplete.
Free verse (vers libre): Poetry written in either rhyme or unrhymed lines that have no set fixed metrical pattern. Read more: What is free verse poetry?
Ghazal: A short lyrical poem that arose in Urdu. It is between 5 and 15 couplets long. Each couplet contains its own poetic thought but is linked in rhyme that's established in the first couplet and continued in the second line of each pair. The lines of each couplet are equal in length. Themes are usually connected to love and romance. The closing signature often includes the poet's name or an allusion to it.
Glosa: Or glose, a form originally from Spain, featuring a quatrain epigraph, and four ten-line stanzas with the last line of each stanza being the corresponding line of the epigraph.
Golden shovel: A poetic form wherein each word of one line from another poem serves as the end word of each line for a newly constructed poem.
Haibun: A form that originated in Japan, this is a work that combines haiku and prose where the prose poem typically describes an environment and precedes a haiku.
Haiku: A Japanese poem composed of three unrhymed lines of seventeen syllables, written in a 5/7/5 syllable count (i.e., morae), and often focuses on images from nature, usually containing a seasonal word. Read more about haiku poetry.
Horatian ode: Short lyric poem written in two or four-line stanzas, each with the same metrical pattern, often addressed to a friend and deals with friendship, love, and the practice of poetry. It's named after its creator, Horace.
Hudibrastic verse: A narrative, humorous form related to the mock epic and consisting of eight-syllable lines and rhyming couplets.
Hymn: A lyric poem of devotion or reverence, typically written as a prayer addressing a deity or deities, or personified subjects.
Iambic pentameter: One short syllable followed by one long one five sets in a row. Example: la-LAH la-LAH la-LAH la-LAH la-LAH. Used extensively in sonnets.
Idyll (Idyl): Poetry that either depicts a peaceful, idealized country scene or a long poem telling a story about heroes of a bygone age.
Inaugural poem: A poem read at a Presidential inauguration.
Incantation: A chant or formulaic use of words invoking or suggesting magic or ritual.
Irregular (Pseudo-Pindaric or Cowleyan) ode: Neither the three-part form of the Pindaric ode nor the two or four-line stanza of the Horatian ode. It is characterized by irregularity of verse and structure and a lack of correspondence between the parts.
Italian sonnet: A sonnet consisting of an octave with the rhyme pattern abbaabba followed by six lines with a rhyme pattern of cdecde or cdcdcd. Read more about Italian sonnets.
Lament: a poem or song expressing personal loss and grief.
Lay: A long narrative poem, especially one that was sung by medieval minstrels.
Limerick: A short sometimes vulgar, humorous poem consisting of five anapestic lines. It's often a comical or nonsensical form popular in children’s literature. Lines 1, 2, and 5 have seven to ten syllables, rhyme, and have the same verbal rhythm. The 3rd and 4th lines have five to seven syllables, rhyme, and have the same rhythm. See an example here.
List: A deliberately organized poem comprised of a list of items or events. It can be any length and rhymed or unrhymed. It can a list of images or adjectives that build up to describe the poem’s subject matter through an inventory of things. See an example here.
Litany: A poetic form that typically uses repetition to catalog a series of invocations or supplications in resemblance to or actually serving as a type of prayer.
Lullaby: A song or folk poem meant to help a child fall asleep.
Lyric: A poem that expresses the thoughts and feelings of the poet. Many songs are written using this type of writing. Read more about lyric poetry.
Madrigal: traditionally a polyphonic form, originally from Italy, that typically consists of a five to fourteen-line poem composed of varying meter with seven to eleven syllables per line and the last two lines as a rhyming couplet.
Memoriam stanza: A quatrain in iambic tetrameter with a rhyme scheme of abba — named after the pattern used by Lord Tennyson.

Naked poetry: Free-verse poetry written without a set form and stripped of any artifice or ornament.
Name poem: Poetry that tells about the word. It uses the letters of the word for the first letter of each line. See an example here.
Narrative: A poem that tells a story. Read more about narrative poetry.
Nature poetry: Poetry that engages with, describes, or considers the natural world.
Nocturne: A poem set at night.
Nonsense poetry: Nonsense verse, or nonsense poetry, is lighthearted whimsical verse that is nonsensical by nature with prosodic elements of rhyme and repetition of phrases and made-up words.
Occasional poem: A poem written to document or provide commentary on an event.
Ode: A lengthy lyric poem typically of a serious or meditative nature that has an elevated style and formal stanza structure. Example: Sappho's “Ode to a Loved One”.
Oríkì: The oral praise poetry of the indigenous Yórùbá communities of Western Africa.
Palinode: An ode or song that retracts or recants what the poet wrote in a previous poem. For instance, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales ends with a retraction, in which he apologizes for the work’s “worldly vanitees” and sinful contents.
Panegyric: A poem of effusive praise with Greek origins. It's closely related to the eulogy and the ode. See Ben Jonson’s “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare” or Anne Bradstreet’s “In Honor of That High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth.”
Pantoum: A poem of any length, composed of four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next stanza. The last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first.
Parody: A comic imitation of another author’s work or characteristic style. See Joan Murray’s “We Old Dudes,” a parody of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool.”
Pastoral: A poem that depicts rural life in a peaceful, romanticized way. This form is also known as bucolic poetry.
Petrarchan: A 14-line sonnet consisting of an octave rhyming abbaabba followed by a sestet of cddcee or cdecde.
Pindaric ode: A ceremonious poem consisting of a strophe (two or more lines repeated as a unit) followed by an antistrophe with the same metrical pattern and concluding with a summary line (an epode) in a different meter. Named after Pindar, a Greek professional lyrist of the 5th century B.C.
Political poetry: poetry that is related to activism, protest, and social concern, or that is commenting on social, political, or current events.
Praise poem: a poem of tribute or gratitude.
Prose poem: a poem that lacks the line breaks traditionally associated with poetry.
Proverb: A short statement or saying that expresses a basic truth.
Quatrain: A stanza or poem consisting of four lines. Lines 2 and 4 must rhyme while having a similar number of syllables.
Renga: A form consisting of alternating tercets and couplets written by multiple collaborating poets.
Rhyme: A rhyming poem has the repetition of the same or similar sounds of two or more words, often at the end of the line. Read more about rhyme usage.
Rhyme royal: A type of poetry consisting of stanzas having seven lines in iambic pentameter.
Riddle: A short poetic form with roots in the oral tradition that poses a question or metaphor.
Romance: A poem about nature and love emphasizing the personal experience.
Rondeau: A lyrical poem of French origin comprised of 10 or 13 lines with two rhymes and the opening phrase repeated twice as the refrain.
Sapphic: A form dating back to ancient Greece made up of metered, four-line stanzas.
Senryu: A short Japanese-style poem, similar to haiku in structure that treats human beings rather than nature: Often in a humorous or satiric way.
Sestina: A poem consisting of six six-line stanzas and a three-line envoy. The end words of the first stanza are repeated in varied order as end words in the other stanzas and also recur in the envoy.
Shakespearean: A 14-line sonnet consisting of three quatrains of abab cdcd efef followed by a couplet, gg. Shakespearean sonnets generally use iambic pentameter. Example: Shakespeare's “Sonnet 2”.
Shape poetry: Poetry written in the shape or form of an object. This is a type of concrete poetry.
Sijo: a Korean poetic form consisting of 44-46 syllables, traditionally in a three-line or six-line poem with varying syllables per line.
Sonnet: A lyric poem that consists of 14 lines which usually have one or more conventional rhyme schemes. Read more about sonnets.
Sound poetry: Intended primarily for performance, sound poetry is sometimes referred to as “verse without words”. This form is seen as the bridging between literary and musical composition in which the phonetics of human speech are used to create a poem.
Tanka: A Japanese poem of five lines, the first and third composed of five syllables and the other seven. See an example here.
Terza rima: A type of poetry consisting of 10 or 11 syllable lines arranged in three-line tercets. Read more about this form and see examples here.
Triolet: An eight-line poem, French in origin, with only two rhymes used throughout.
Verbless poetry: Poetry written without the use of verbs.
Verse: A single metrical line of poetry.
Verse novel: A hybrid form in which a narrative with structural and stylistic similarities to a traditional novel is told through poetry.
Villanelle: A 19-line poem consisting of five tercets and a final quatrain on two rhymes. The first and third lines of the first tercet repeat alternately as a refrain closing the succeeding stanzas and joining as the final couplet of the quatrain.
Visual poetry: The visual arrangement of text, images, and symbols to help convey the meaning of the work. Visual poetry is sometimes referred to as a type of concrete poetry.
Zuihitsu: A form that originated in Japan, composed largely of interweaving together writings in prose and poetry on ideas or subjects that typically respond to the author’s surroundings.

Sources: (1) “55 Types of Poetry Forms | PoemOfQuotes.com” (2) Glossary of Poetic Terms | Poets.org. (3) Glossary of Poetic Terms | PoetryFoundation.org.
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