Handbook of Poetic Forms

A reference guide to various forms of poetry with entries arranged in alphabetical order. Each entry defines the form and gives its history, examples, and suggestions for usage.

For the Handbook, 19 teaching poets have written 76 entries on traditional and modern poetic forms. The Handbook succinctly defines the forms, summarizes their histories, quotes good examples (ancient and modern, by adults and young writers), and offers professional tricks of the trade on how to use each form. In most cases, the origins of the names of the forms (as well as phonetic guides to their pronunciations) are given. Entries are cross-referenced, and a bibliography and list of cited authors are included.

Among the 76 entries are the abstract poem, acrostic, allegory, ballad, ballade, blank verse, blues poem, bout-rimes, calligram, canto, cento, concrete poem, eclogue, elegy, epic, epigram, epithalamium, free verse, ghazal, macaronic, madrigal, occasional poem, ode, ottava rima, pantoum, performance poem, projective verse, prose poem, rap, renga, rondeau, senryu, sestina, sonnet, syllabic verse, terza rima, triolet, villanelle, and many others. The Handbook gives examples from Shakespeare, Woody Guthrie, John Bunyan, Wallace Stevens, Edgar Allan Poe, Francois Villon, Christopher Marlowe, Elizabeth Bishop, John Milton, Langston Hughes, John Ashbery, Dante, Ezra Pound, Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Guillaume Apollinaire, Ted Berrigan, Pablo Neruda, Anne Waldman, T. S. Eliot, Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Percy Shelley, and many others, including Eskimo and Native American Poems.