Only today’s “Stanzas for Music” — the 1816 poem that begins “There be none of Beauty’s daughters” — is a present-tense love poem: a claim of awe at the presence of the object of love. The poem, two ...

This article is part of the Lily Lines newsletter. You can sign up here to get it delivered twice a week to your inbox. One of my dearest college professors, a trim man with a gentle face, elegant ...

The stanzas close stanza Stanzas separate poems into groups of lines. in a poem are like paragraphs in prose. They separate ideas and give shape, and guide the reader through the poem.

Form in poetry is not about a poem's structure (that's plot). Form is exterior; structure is interior. Poetic form is about ordering our ideas into lines and stanzas.

Our critic A.O. Scott walks you through a poem that speaks to his mood right now. It’s called “Party Politics,” but it’s not about those parties, or those politics.

Poems don’t have to be perfect, but this one pretty much is. ... There is a cascade of v’s running down from the fourth line across the second stanza.

Stanza and Deliver: ... earth-shaking environmental impact in words—it felt like I could hold that tension in poems,” she says. “Each line and line break can create that emotional tension on ...

As you repeat a line or a stanza again and again, signification temporarily gives way to the felt texture of language: its rhythms, pressures, temperatures. These are gestures that say nothing but ...

In “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity,” Cowper uses the long-syllable quantities of the three initial hexameter lines in each stanza to capture something of the slow oppressiveness of his mad ...

There will be clues to the tone not just in the language but in the punctuation and structure of the lines and stanzas, so try a few different ways to read the poem if you aren’t sure.