5 Poetic techniques

Poets are skilled at noticing things, and one of the things we should learn to notice is how other poets employ the various devices at their disposal. All poems, even those which don’t conform to a pre-existing model or form, use technical elements, even if these may not be immediately apparent. In the next few sections you are going to explore certain technical aspects of poetic writing:

• lines and line-breaks
• free verse
• stanzas and verse
• tercets
• quatrains
• other stanza lengths.