Types of poems

A 14-line poem in iambic pentameter, usually with a turn of thought near the end.

167 examples

A three-line Japanese form of 5-7-5 syllables capturing a single vivid moment.

9 examples

A five-line comic verse with an AABBA rhyme and a galloping rhythm.

4 examples

Poetry without regular meter or rhyme, shaped instead by line breaks and breath.

47 examples

A poem where the first letters of each line spell a word, read downward.

4 examples

A formal poem of praise addressed to a person, thing, or idea.

5 examples

A poem of mourning and consolation for someone or something lost.

14 examples

A narrative poem in song-like quatrains, built to tell a story.

10 examples

A 19-line form with two refrains that return like waves — obsession in verse.

A poem that tells a complete story, with characters, plot, and setting.

11 examples

A short personal poem expressing feeling — the default mode of most poetry.

963 examples

Two consecutive rhyming lines — poetry's smallest complete unit.

3 examples

A rhyming poem repeats matching end-sounds in a pattern — a rhyme scheme like ABAB or AABB — that makes verse musical and memorable.

108 examples

A short poem says one complete thing in a handful of lines — compression doing the work that length usually does.

330 examples

Nonsense poems use invented words, impossible creatures, and flawless meter to make absurdity sound inevitable.

5 examples

A rondeau is a 15-line French form rhyming AABBA AABR AABBAR, in which the poem's opening words return twice as a refrain.

3 examples

A tanka is a five-line Japanese poem of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables — like a haiku that stays two lines longer to say how it feels.

2 examples

A senryu is a three-line poem in haiku's 5-7-5 shape that observes human nature instead of the natural world — usually with a smirk.

2 examples

A cinquain is a five-line poem — either the classroom pattern of noun, adjectives, verbs, phrase, and synonym, or Adelaide Crapsey's counted form of 2-4-6-8-2 syllables.

2 examples

A concrete poem arranges its words into a shape that pictures its subject — the poem's visual form is part of its meaning.

Blackout poetry is made by redacting a printed page — usually newspaper — with a marker until only your chosen words remain.

An epic is a long narrative poem on a heroic scale — gods, wars, and voyages that define a culture, from the Iliad to Paradise Lost.

A prose poem is poetry written in paragraphs — no line breaks, but all of poetry's compression, imagery, and music.

1 example

A sestina is a 39-line form in which the same six end-words rotate through six stanzas and a closing envoi in a fixed spiral pattern.

A pantoum is a poem in quatrains where lines 2 and 4 of each stanza return as lines 1 and 3 of the next — the poem moves forward while looking back.

A ghazal is a Persian and Urdu form of five or more independent couplets sharing one refrain (radif), often signed with the poet's own name in the final couplet.

2 examples

A quatrain is a four-line stanza or poem — the most common building block in English-language verse.

19 examples

An epigram is a very short poem — usually two to four lines — that ends with a witty sting.

3 examples

A found poem lifts text never meant as poetry — menus, signs, transcripts, instruction manuals — and reframes it with selection and line breaks.

'Roses are red, violets are blue' is a four-line valentine template first printed in Gammer Gurton's Garland (1784), with roots in a 1590 stanza by Edmund Spenser.

15 examples