The allusion literary device borrows meaning from other works. Trace Faulkner's Macbeth reference and learn what it adds to a passage. See examples in context.
Samantha Zighelboim
A ballad poem moves its story through action, speech, and song-shaped stanzas. Explore its beat, traditions, and ways to write your own. Read the article.
Learn how to write a sonnet by giving one tension fourteen lines. Shape the rhyme, rhythm, and turn with a line-by-line example. See the drafting steps.
Sonnet 116 stakes the speaker's writing on love that never changes. Explore the full poem, its argument, and the final couplet's bold wager in our reading.
A petrarchan sonnet pairs an ABBAABBA octave with a sestet and a turning point. Learn how its structure shapes meaning and differs from Shakespeare's. Read on.
The apostrophe literary device turns description into an address to the absent, the dead, or nature. Learn what that shift reveals in the article's examples.
A Shakespearean sonnet builds its argument in three quatrains and a couplet. An annotated Sonnet 18 shows how form shapes meaning. Explore the reading method.
An AABB rhyme scheme links neighboring lines in couplets. Compare AABB with ABAB and explore Blake, Stevenson and Auden through examples. See how it works.
Learn how to write a haiku from a real observation, using two images, a seasonal hint, and a pause. Compare Japanese and English approaches in the article.
Read three Robert Frost poems in full, including “The Road Not Taken,” with notes on style, essential works, collections, and his life. Explore the poems.
Learn how five literary devices, from metaphor to alliteration, shape a sentence's meaning and sound, with examples for reading and writing. See how they work.
What is a haiku? A Japanese poem shaped by a season word and a cut between two images, not just 5-7-5. Explore the form and why syllable counts mislead.
What is a sonnet? Learn how fourteen lines, rhyme patterns, and the volta shape its meaning, with Italian and English forms explained. Read the article.
Explore 11 types of poems, from sonnets to erasure poems, with the rule that defines each and an example showing why it works. See all 11 forms explained.
Learn how a rhyme scheme works with AABB in “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” common patterns, and practice stanzas with answers. See the examples and try it.
This entry is part of a series, OF LAMB by Matthea Harvey» Samantha Zighelboim: How did you become interested in the process of erasure? Matthea Harvey: I first read about erasures in Heather McHugh’s wonderful book, Broken English. There’s an image from Tom Phillips’s A Humument (which I adore) on the cover and her essay, “Broken, As in English” discusses, in her characteristically brilliant way (“All poetry is fragment: it is shaped by its breakages at every turn”) Phillips’ work as well as the fragments of Archilochus (“the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”), Heraclitus and Parmenides. It’s interesting to think about what the eraser’s attitude towards their text is. Jen Bervin’s beautiful Nets is a respectful erasure—she allows her erased poems to talk to the original Shakespeare sonnets because the poems are printed in grey and her selections are in boldface (or shyface). Someone [...]