Onomatopoeia in Poetry
How words imitate sound—and how poets turn noise, rhythm, and silence into meaning
Poetry Guides
Poetic Technique
Guides to metre, rhyme, imagery, and other techniques of poetic craft.
Allusion in Poetry
How references to stories, history and culture create layers of meaning in a poem
Stanzas in Poetry
How groups of lines create pattern, pause, movement and meaning
Figurative Language in Poetry
How comparison, substitution and address turn ordinary language into poetic thought
Repetition in Poetry
How repeated words, phrases and patterns create music, emphasis and changing meaning
Sound Devices in Poetry
How alliteration, assonance, consonance and other patterns of sound shape the way a poem moves, feels and means
Enjambment and Line Breaks
How poets use line endings, continuation, pause and expectation to shape movement and meaning
Imagery in Poetry
How sensory language turns words into sights, sounds, textures, tastes, scents and imagined experience
Rhyme
How repeated sounds create pattern, expectation, emphasis and musical shape in poetry
Metre and Rhythm
How stress, beat, metre and rhythmic variation give poetry its movement and music
Volta
How poems turn in thought, feeling, image and sound