Poetry depends on several technical features: the choice of words, their position
in the lines and their sound.
Poetry comes from a Greek word which means both ‘doing’ and making. The poet is someone who made or created things.
Poetry is made up of lines, grouped into larger units called stanzas. Words are chosen not
only for their meaning but also for their sound.
The Rhythm of a poem derives from a combination of several factors: line length, number of beats (accents) for each line, rhyme.
Lines of poetry can be measured in two ways: by counting the syllables and by
counting the beats (or accents, or stresses) to the line.
The repetitions of sounds in a poem is also an important device used by poets.
Their main instruments are: rhyme, alliteration and assonance.
The lines that we have divided into syllables can also be divided according to the
number of beats to the line.
The alternation of strong and weak stresses in a line is one of the main factors
of the rhythm.
The beat is the combination of unstressed and stressed syllables within the line.
The regular alternation of weak and strong stresses is technically called a jamb. The iamb
sequence (unstressed/stressed syllables) is one of the most common patterns in
English poetry.
Rhyme
An important factor in any poem is rhyme (or lack of it). As in Italian, we speak of
rhyme when a word has the same sound ending as another word. Rhymes are usually found at the end of the lines. Internal rhymes are those rhyming words which are found within the lines. To describe the rhyme scheme of a poem we use letters.
Alliteration and assonance
Alliteration is the repetition of consonant sounds, and assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds.
By alliteration we mean the use of the same consonant sounds especially at the
beginning of several words or syllables that are close together.
By assonance we mean the use of the same or similar vowel sounds in several
words or parts of a word.
Rhetoric simply means (fom the Greek) ‘the art of speaking’ - or, ‘the art of
speaking well'.There are many rhetorical tools that professional writers use and they are called retorical figures or figures of speech.
Metaphore is a figure of speech which consists in transferring the meaning of a
word to another with some analogies, a sort of comparison but without the connectiion words such like or as.
The simile is a comparison between two terms which are clearly separate and are linked by a word of likening such as like or as.