The Major Differences Between Poems and

Prose

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 Poetry’s Purpose
• Poetry is a form of
writing that is
meant to
1. entertain
2. describe
3. inform
4. persuade
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 Elements of Poetry
•What is poetry?
•Poetry is not prose. Prose is the ordinary language people
use in speaking or writing.
•Poetry is a form of literary expression that captures intense
experiences or creative perceptions of the world in a
musical language.
•Basically, if prose is like talking, poetry is like singing.

•By looking at the set up of a poem, you can see the

difference between prose and poetry.

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Distinguishing Characteristics of Poetry

• Prose has a narrator, on the other hand, poetry

has a speaker / persona.

– A speaker, or voice, talks to the reader. The

speaker is not necessarily the poet. It can also be a
fictional person, an animal or even a thing

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 Example
Lie back, daughter, let your head
Be tipped back in the cup of my hand

from “First Lesson” by Philip Booth

who is the speaker?

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 Poetry is written in lines and stanzas
• A line is just one line of writing.
• A stanza is a group of lines separated by a
space from another group of lines.
• Read the following slide to understand the
difference between lines and stanzas.

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I Love To Write Poems
(title) A line in the
• (First Stanza) poem
• I love to write Day and night
• What would my heart do
• But cry, sigh and be blue
• If I could not write

• (Second Stanza)
• Writing feels good
• And I know it should A stanza
• Who could have knew
• That what I do
• Is write, write, write-
• Unknown Author
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 Figures of Speech
• A figure of speech is a word or expression that is not meant
to be read literally.
• BOTH PROSE AND POETRY USE FIGURES OF
SPEECH

• A simile is a figure of speech using a word such as like or as

to compare seemingly
Example unlike things.
Does it stink like rotten meat?
from “Harlem” by Langston Hughes

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 Figures of Speech

• A metaphor also compares seemingly unlike

things, but does not use like or as.

You might be a doorknob!

Or three baked potatoes!
You might be a bag full of
hard green tomatoes. (Happy Birthday by Dr. Suess)

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 Personification attributes human like
characteristics to an animal, object, or idea.

Example
A Spider sewed at Night
from “A Spider sewed at Night” by Emily Dickinson

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 Figures of Speech

• Hyperbole – a figure of speech in which great

exaggeration is used for emphasis or
humorous effect.

Example
“You’ve asked me a million times!”

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 Figures of Speech
• Allusion - refers to a person, place, historical
event, other literature or ancient source such as
the Bible, mythology, ancient poets etc.

Example:

● His smile is like kryptonite to me. ...

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Imagery is descriptive language that applies to
the senses – sight, sound, touch, taste, or
smell. Some images appeal to more than one
sense.

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 Sound Devices
• Alliteration is the repetition of consonant
sounds at the beginning of words.
• Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds
within a line of poetry.
• Onomatopoeia is the use of a word or phrase,
such as “hiss” or “buzz” that imitates or
suggests the sound of what it describes.

BOTH POETRY AND PROSE USE SOUND DEVICES

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 Example of Sound Devices
• Betty Botter by Mother Goose
• Betty Botter bought some butter, but, she said, the
butter’s bitter; if I put it in my batter it will make my
batter bitter, but a bit of better butter will make my
batter better.
• So she bought a bit of butter better than her bitter
butter, and she put it in her batter and the batter was
not bitter. So ’twas better Betty Botter bought a bit of
better butter.
• THIS IS ALLITERATION

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 Poems break grammar rules

The rusty spigot Each line does

sputters, not have to
utters begin with a
capital letter or
a splutter be a complete
sentence.
THIS MAKES
POEMS VERY
DIFFERENT
FROM PROSE.

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 Example of Sound Devices
• Onomatopoeia (by Eve Merriam)
• The rusty spigot
sputters,
utters
a splutter,
spatters a smattering of drops,
gashes wider;
slash
splatters
scatters
spurts
finally stops sputtering
and plash!
gushes rushes splashes
clear water dashes.
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 Rhyme
• Rhyme is the repetition of the same stressed vowel
sound and any succeeding sounds in two or more
words.
• Internal rhyme occurs within a line of poetry.
• End rhyme occurs at the end of lines.
• Rhyme scheme is the pattern of end rhymes that may
be designated by assigning a different letter of the
alphabet to each new rhyme

BOTH POEMS AND PROSE CAN USE RHYME

BUT IT IS MOST CLOSeLY CONNECTED TO POEMS
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 Example
“All mine!" Yertle cried. "Oh, the things I now
rule! A
I'm king of a cow! And I'm king of a mule! A
I'm king of a house! And what's more, beyond
that, B
I'm king of a blueberry bush and cat! B
I'm Yertle the Turtle! Oh, marvelous me! C
For I am the ruler of all that I see!” C
from “Yertle the Turtle”
by Dr. Seuss

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 A couplet
• In poetry, a couplet is a pair of lines. Typically,
they rhyme and have the same meter. They make
up a unit or complete thought.

“All mine!" Yertle cried. "Oh, the

things I now rule!
I'm king of a cow! And I'm king of a
mule!
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 Elements of Poetry: Tone and Mood
Although many times we use the words mood and tone
interchangeably, they do not necessarily mean the same
thing.
Mood – the feeling or atmosphere that a poet creates.
Mood can suggest an emotion (ex. “excited”) or the quality
of a setting (ex. “calm”, “somber”) In a poem, mood can be
established through word choice, line length, rhythm, etc.
Tone – a reflection of the poet’s attitude toward the subject
of a poem. Tone can be serious, sarcastic, humorous, etc.

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 Forms of Poetry

• Poetry can take several

forms. These are:

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 Forms of Poetry
1. Shape Poems
2. Acrostic Poems
3. Ballads
4. Lyrical Poems
5. Haikus
6. Narrative Poems
7. Free Verse
8. Blank Verse
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Shape Poem

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 Narrative Poetry
• Narrative poetry is verse that tells a story.
• Two of the major examples of narrative poetry include:
– Ballads – a song or poem that tells a story. Folk
ballads, which typically tell of an exciting or dramatic
event, were composed by an anonymous singer or
author and passed on by word of mouth for
generations before written down. Literary ballads are
written in imitation of folk ballads, but usually given
an author.
– Click on this link to hear the folk ballad “Casey Jones”
– Epics – a long narrative poem on a great and serious
subject that is centered on the actions of a heroic figure

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 Dramatic Poetry
• Dramatic poetry is poetry in which one or
more characters speak.
– Each speaker always addresses a specific listener.
– This listener may be silent (but identifiable), or the
listener may be another character who speaks in
reply.
– Usually the conflict that the speaker is involved
with is either an intense or emotional.

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 Haikus
• The traditional Japanese haiku is an unrhymed poem that
contains exactly 17 syllables, arranged in 3 lines of 5, 7, 5
syllables each.
• However, when poems written in Japanese are translated into
another language, this pattern is often lost.
• The purpose of a haiku is to capture a flash of insight that
occurs during a solitary observation of nature.

The moon is a week old -

A dandelion to blow
Scattering star seed. (Ruby Lytle)

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 Free Verse
• Free verse is poetry that has no fixed pattern
of meter, rhyme, line length, or stanza
arrangement.
• When writing free verse, a poet is free to vary
the poetic elements to emphasize an idea or
create a tone.
• In writing free verse, a poet may choose to use
repetition or similar grammatical structures to
emphasize and unify the ideas in the poem.
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 Free Verse
“Tell Me” by Shel Silverstein

• Tell me I’m clever,

• Tell me I’m kind,
• Tell me I’m talented,
• Tell me I’m cute,
• Tell me I’m sensitive,
• Graceful and wise,
• Tell me I’m perfect,
• But tell me the truth
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 Free Verse
• While the majority of popular poetry today is written
as free verse, the style itself is not new. Walt
Whitman, writing in the 1800’s, created free verse
poetry based on forms found in the King James Bible.
• Modern free verse is concerned with the creation of a
brief, ideal image, not the refined ordered (and
artificial, according to some critics) patterns that
other forms of poetry encompass.
• Follow this link to an example of Free Verse

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 To Sum it up!

Poems have: Prose has:

• Rythmn /rhyme schemes • Characters
• Meter • Narration
• Verses • Paragraph
• Stanzas • Follows grammar rules
• Lines • Chapters
• Breaks grammar rules • Headings/titles/subtitles
• Voice/speaker • Point of view
• Setting
• Mood
• Plot
• couplets
• Voice
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