There are many different tools employed by the poet in his work. Rhyme springs immediately to mind, but there is so much more to poetry than rhyme – indeed, there is even a great deal of prose poetry out there! Rhythm is one important aspect – it makes a poem almost musical. Two more oft used conventions are assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds) and alliteration (the repetition of the first consonant in a series of words). Here’s an example of each:
”The early bird catches the worm.”
"Face the fire at freedom's front."
It may be that you can recite pages of verse from memory but do you know how many syllables there are in an iambic pentameter? Even more obscure - do you know who was imprisoned in 1873 for shooting Arthur Rimbaud? Yes? Then have a go at this, the third in our series of four quizzes on poetry!
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An example from Shakespeare's play Richard III - "Now is the winter of our discontent"
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It commemorates an actual event on board a French ship. The son of its commander remained at his post and died when the fire caused an explosion.
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Verlaine, in a drunken, jealous rage at his rival, fired two shots at Rimbaud, wounding him, though not seriously. He was gaoled for 2 years
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His full name was Edmund Clerihew Bentley
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Longfellow wrote The Wreck of the Hesperus
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It comes from the 1885 collection A Child’s Garden of Verses
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His 1992 novel The Afterlife of George Cartwright won the Thomas Head Raddall Award and his 1998 poetry collection That Night We Were Ravenous won the Atlantic Poetry Prize
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The poem was the subject of an obscenity trial, as it was openly homosexual at a time when that was illegal in the United States
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A haiku poem has 3 lines. The first and third both contain 5 syllables and the second contains 7
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Elliot emigrated to Britain when he was 25 and he renounced his U.S. citizenship when he became a British subject aged 39
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