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The young woman says, "July is over,
but you don't have to go on and
on about it. There's always August."

And with these three lines, I'm prepared to lay out the difference between using an end-stop or enjambment at the ends of your lines. Want to really impress and flatter a fellow poet at the same time? All you need to do is talk up their wonderful use of enjambment.

Lines 1 and 3 in the above example use an end-stop, which just means that your line finishes its thought (often with the use of punctuation) before moving on to the next line.

Line 2 uses enjambment by running over into line 3. That's right, enjambment is when you run your idea from one line into another (or many others).

So, why use one over the other? Well, the way you use end-stops and enjambment can affect the speed readers move through your poem. End-stopping tends to slow down the pace, while enjambing picks it up. Personally, I like to mix it up some to achieve certain effects within my poems, especially if I want to emphasize certain ideas or images.

If you haven't tried using end-stops and enjambment before (or haven't thought about it since "the good old days" of school), then you might want to try playing around with these tools in your poems. If nothing else, you can now start complimenting other poets' end-stops and enjambments-and actually know what you're talking about.

CATEGORIES
Poetic Terms, Poetry Craft Tips

About Robert Lee Brewer

Senior Content Editor, Writer's Digest Community.

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Poetic Terms: End-stops and Enjambment | WritersDigest.com

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The young woman says, "July is over,but you don't have to go on andon about it. There's always August." And with these three lines, I'm prepared to lay out the difference between using an end-stop or enjambment at the ends of your lines. Want to really impress and flatter a fellow poet at the same time?

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Take it easy on the rhymes. Remember that end stops make a poem sound sing song. For more serious subjects, rhymes should be used with lines that are enjambment helps make rhymes more serious.

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RhymeZone rhyming dictionary and thesaurus

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A comprehensive rhyming dictionary, thesaurus, and brainstorming tool for the English language. Includes dozens of functions to help songwriters, poets, and anyone else in need of a word.

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Thesaurus

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Thesaurus.com - The world's favorite online thesaurus!

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Thesaurus.com is the world's largest and most trusted online thesaurus for 25+ years. Join millions of people and grow your mastery of the English language.

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It's a thing. Try it! It's coming back

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[ Update: This post used to list 50 poetic forms for poets, but I've updated it with 86 poetic forms for poets. Because forms rock!]

I'm in the middle of putting together my list of poetic forms to cover in the ( 2015) 2018 issues of Writer's Digest magazine, and it prompted me to take a look at what I've already covered on this blog over the years. As the title of this post suggests, I've covered at least ( 50) 80 forms.

Be sure to check out each form. It might even make a good year-long challenge to write one form each week of the year (or every 4-5 days).

Here's my list of 86 poetic forms:

(Note: Click on the name of each form to read the full description in the original posts.)

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Have you tried a WD Poetic Form Challenge?
Every month or so, Poetic Asides hosts a WD Poetic Form Challenge-a free poetry challenge in which poets try their hand at a specific poetic form. The current challenge is for the madrigal ( click here for the guidelines), but if that deadline has passed, poets can always check the Poetic Asides home page for the most recent challenge.

Click to continue.

*****

The Fib. Fun form from Gregory K. Pincus.

Found Poetry. Finders keepers, right?

Ghazal. Couplets and a refrain.

Gogyohka. 5-line poem developed by Enta Kusakabe.

Golden Shovel. Terrance Hayes-invented, Gwendolyn Brooks-inspired.

Gwawdodyn. Welsh poetic form.

Haibun. Japanese form popularized by Matsuo Basho.

Haiku. Popular Japanese form.

Haiku Sonnet. 4 haiku and a couplet.

Hay(na)ku. Eileen Tabios form with 3 lines, 6 words.

Hir a Thoddaid. 6 lines that mostly all share the same rhyme.

Huitain. French 8-liner with an ababbcbc rhyme scheme.

Interlocking Rubaiyat. Used by Omar Khayyam, Robert Frost, and many others.

Katauta Poems. Haiku (or senryu) for lovers.

Kimo. Israeli version of haiku.

Kyrielle. Adjustable French form.

Lai. Nine-liner from the French.

Landay. Poem comprised of self-contained couplets.

Limerick. 5 lines and naughty rhymes.

List Poem. Poetry at the grocery store.

Luc Bat. Vietnamese "6-8" form.

Lune. Robert Kelly invention, also known as American haiku.

Madrigal. Learn both the Italian and English versions.

Magic 9. The "abacadaba" 9-line rhyme scheme.

Minute Poem. 3 quatrains and a simple rhyme scheme.

Mondo. Brief collaborative Q&A poem.

Monotetra. Quatrain madness developed by Michael Walker.

Nonet. Nine-line countdown poem.

Ode. Praise poetry!

Ottava Rima. ABC rhymes in 8 lines.

Ovillejo Poems. 10-liner popularized by Miguel de Cervantes.

*****
Master Poetic Forms!
Learn how to write sestina, shadorma, haiku, monotetra, golden shovel, and more with The Writer's Digest Guide to Poetic Forms, by Robert Lee Brewer.

This e-book covers more than 40 poetic forms and shares examples to illustrate how each form works. Discover a new universe of poetic possibilities and apply it to your poetry today!

Click to continue.

*****

Palindrome (or Mirror Poetry). Reflective poetic form.

Pantoum. The repetitive form from Malay.

Paradelle. Silly and/or psycho form from Billy Collins.

Prose. Just when you thought poetry was defined by line breaks.

Qasida. Guest post by Ren Powell.

Quatern. French 4×4 form.

Rannaigheact Mhor. Irish form that fits a lot of rules into 28 syllables.

Rhupunt. Welsh form that offers variability and rigidity simultaneously.

Rimas Dissolutas. Old French form that rhymes and doesn't rhyme.

Rispetto. Italian poetic form.

Rondeau. 15 lines, 3 stanzas, and a lot of rhymes.

Rondel. 13 lines in 3 stanzas.

Rondine. 12-liner with a refrain.

The Roundabout. Form from Sara Diane Doyle and David Edwards.

Roundelay. Simple lyric poem that uses a refrain.

Seguidilla. Spanish 7-liner that began as a dance song.

Sestina. The form poets either love or hate.

Shadorma. Spanish 6-liner.

Sijo. Korean poetic form.

Somonka. Japanese collaborative form.

Sonnet. Shakespeare's 14-line fave.

Tanka. Kinda like a haiku plus a couplet.

Terzanelle. What happens when the terza rima and villanelle combine.

Tricubes. 3 stanzas by 3 lines by 3 syllables.

Triolet. 8-line French form.

Triversen. William Carlos Williams invention: six tercets.

Villanelle. Five tercets and a quatrain.

*****

Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer's Digest Writing Community and author of the poetry collection, Solving the World's Problems (Press 53). He edits Poet's Market, Writer's Market, and Guide to Self-Publishing, in addition to writing a free weekly WritersMarket.com newsletter and poetry column for Writer's Digest magazine.

A former Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere, Robert has been a featured poet at events across the country and is married to poet Tammy Foster Brewer, who helps him keep track of their five little poets.

Follow him on Twitter @ robertleebrewer.

*****

Find more poetic goodness here:

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CATEGORIES
Poetic Forms, Robert Lee Brewer's Poetic Asides Blog, What's New

About Robert Lee Brewer

Senior Content Editor, Writer's Digest Community.

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List of 50 Poetic Forms for Poets | Types of Poetry and Poems

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From abstract poems to villanelles, find a range of poetic forms for poets in this list, including French, Spanish, Vietnamese, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Welsh, and contemporary forms! Each listing links to a more comprehensive description of the form along with an example poem using the form.

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Write a poem inspired by a National Geographic

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Two Buffalo Drink Under the Stars | National Geographic Your Shot Photo of the Day

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Two buffalo drink under South Africa's starry sky in this National Geographic Your Shot Photo of the Day.

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What is nature writing? from the New York Times

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If William's effusions have a familiar ring to even the most urban sensibility, there is good reason. After its publication in 1791, Bartram's ''Travels'' was devoured by the generation of young European poets that included the author of ''Kubla Khan.'' Bartram supplied Coleridge, Wordsworth, Chateaubriand, and others with genuine examples of the exotic, Rousseau- esque wonders they hungered for - not only ''caverns measureless to man,'' but noble Creek warriors, lovely Cherokee maidens, flowery savannas, fragrant groves, brilliant birds. The wonders seem a little overblown to us today, but they were real, honestly observed and vividly described. Fragments of their splendor still linger in today's condominium-laden Florida. The ''magnificent plains of Alachuah,'' where Bartram saw ''the thundering alligator'' and ''the sonorous savanna cranes,'' are now a state preserve, although there's an Interstate freeway through one corner of them.

The ''Travels'' didn't evoke as much interest in America as it did in Europe. Most Americans were unprepared for its glowing picture of wilds that lay only a few days' travel to the west. One reviewer found its subject interesting but its style ''disgustingly pompous.'' As the romantic sensibility filtered westward across the Atlantic, however, Bartram's poetic wilderness followed it. ''Do you know Bartram's 'Travels'?'' Carlyle wrote to Emerson, ''Treats of Florida generally, has a wonderful kind of floundering eloquence in it; and has grown immeasurably old. All American libraries ought to provide themselves with that kind of book; and keep them as a future biblical article.''

If the more flowery passages in Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales are to be believed, American pioneers were beginning to sound more like William than his father. In fact, early 19th-century frontier letters contain quite a few effusive descriptions of flowery prairies and soaring forests along with more prosaic matters, suggesting that nature-loving in the romantic mode had caught on.

Nature writing changed as romanticism evolved into Victorian pragmatic optimism. Its scientific orientation deepened, and at the same time it began to question the directions in which economic applications of science were leading civilization. It became increasingly aware of ecology, in other words. William Bartram hadn't given too much thought to the relationship of civilization and wilderness. (His patron had sent him to scout the Southeast's agricultural and industrial potential as well as to study its natural history.) But Henry Thoreau did, and John Muir after him. Pragmatic, optimistic men (both were mechanically skilled inventors as well as naturalists), they saw wilderness as a remedy for the enervations and constraints of growing industrial towns. They hauled it down from the garret of romanticism to the Victorian parlor and kitchen. ''We require an infusion of hemlock, spruce, or arbor vitae in our tea,'' wrote Thoreau, with characteristic pungency (and hyperbole). ''Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamp.''

Although they often are seen as opposed to 19th-century expansionism, Thoreau and Muir were men of their time, inhabiting a planet with about a quarter of today's population. Land speculators saw hope and future in quaking swamps too, although they differed from Thoreau in wanting to see them drained after they'd bought them cheap. One might say that Thoreau and Muir liked the expansive quality of the frontier so much that they wanted to make it permanent, to integrate its challenges and exhilarations with civilization. From this desire, expressed in Thoreau's New England swamp ruminations and Muir's California mountaintop raptures, arose the concept of the wilderness park, America's unique contribution to global culture.

As Victorian optimism ripened into Edwardian euphoria, the words of Thoreau and Muir struck increasingly responsive chords with the public. Expansion of the frontier was making America rich, but it was gobbling up natural resources so fast that the idea of preserving some wilderness for recreation, or at least for future use, had become respectable. Nature writing had a heyday at the turn of the century, especially during the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, himself a nature writer of sorts. It would be hard to imagine John Muir going camping in Yosemite with the present Republican incumbent, but he did with Teddy Roosevelt. John Burroughs, a less acerbic writer than Thoreau or Muir, enjoyed tremendous popularity with books about countryside wildlife, and went camping with Henry Ford and Thomas Edison as well as Roosevelt.

The heyday didn't survive Muir and Roosevelt. The scientifically conducted carnage of the First World War revealed the rot at the Edwardian core, and pragmatic optimism became a mark of naive boosterism. Many American writers were overtaken by a wave of nostalgia for the prescientific, for the nobility in which religion and history can clothe humanity. Muir and Thoreau had complained eloquently of human conceit and destructiveness, but they still had taken for granted a high degree of human significance. It was harder to do this after a generation of young men had been slaughtered in the trenches. The pragmatic remedies of progressives seemed inadequate to modernists, who sought utopias.

The modernist flight of American writers to Europe was a frontier in reverse. Nature writing meant little to its pioneers, Pound and Eliot, who turned their backs on Idaho and Missouri to embrace medieval Europe. Even the outdoorsman Ernest Hemingway had a medieval attitude toward wilderness. It was a place for hunting, fishing or war, not for seeking knowledge, transcendent or otherwise. Knowledge was for priests. D. H. Lawrence excluded Thoreau from his canon of American classics, regarding him as a coldhearted detailer of biotic mechanisms.

But nostalgia for the prescientific degenerated into fascism, helping bring about the Second World War and even more murderous applications of science. As though seeking an antidote in the serpent that had stung it, the postwar world turned back to pragmatic optimism of a sort, with much talk of new frontiers in the Arctic, the tropics, the oceans, space. Nature writing underwent a resurgence, partly as a result of renewed public interest in science, partly as a result of renewed public uneasiness about its applications. The popularity of Rachel Carson's best-seller,''The Sea Around Us,'' which eloquently introduced the public to many new discoveries about the biosphere, gave her the time and authority to write ''Silent Spring,'' which eloquently introduced the public to the many new dangers of pesticides and herbicides.

Carson and other outstanding postwar nature writers, such as Aldo Leopold and Loren Eisely, were somewhat different from their predecessors, reflecting American society's growing dependence on expert knowledge. Bartram, Thoreau, and Muir were amateurs, but Carson, Leopold, and Eiseley were institutionally trained and employed scientists. There were advantages and disadvantages to this. Carson and her colleagues could appeal to vastly expanded knowledge of the biosphere's interdependence when advocating wilderness preservation, while Muir and Thoreau worked more from intuition. On the other hand, professional positions may have inhibited postwar writers from the robust partisanship that let John Muir lobby unabashedly for birds and flowers in 19th-century Sacramento.

There's no doubt that Carson, Eisley, and Leopold contributed greatly to the wave of environmental partisanship in the 1960's and 70's. That surge has encouraged a new crop of nature writers; despite continuing shrinkage of wilderness, there probably are more nature writers today than ever. It remains to be seen whether we'll be as influential as our predecessors. At times, the prospects look dim. Since land development became a major industry, there has been an expectation in some quarters that wilderness simply will disappear eventually, replaced by artifice. Some writers seem to have accepted this. They write like undertakers: an elegy on every page. A new book about this or that last wilderness comes out at least once a year.

It's important for us to know how bad things are, but to me there's something unimaginative about the elegists. As dealers in myth, writers ought to know better than to let technocrats and salesmen mesmerize them into believing that civilization can conquer nature. They should understand that this is a myth too, what one might call the myth of nature as loser. But nature is not a loser because it is not a competitor: It simply is. We have better myths. Evolution, the vast, intricate story of four-billion-year-old wilderness earth, throws a cold light on man the conqueror. The nature- as-loser myth was useful when humanity was small and wilderness large; it encouraged the growth of civilization, and of knowledge. It's of doubtful utility to us, who are capable of reducing the biosphere to dust. It is not nature that will have lost in that event.

THERE'S a lot of work for nature writers to do. It's not quite the same work that William Bartram faced. Adventure is a luxury commodity today, packaged by tour agencies. The old, romantic, exotic nature writing is of declining relevance. I wonder how many people have gone to the library to read about something in their local woods and found books about the Arctic, the tropics, the oceans and space, but nothing much about their local woods. I certainly have: It's one more reason I started writing nature books.

Carson, Leopold, and Eiseley did much of their exploring in their studies. The most daunting challenge facing nature writers today is not travel but data. Somebody has to translate information into feelings and visions. This is not to say that nature writers now must spend all their time at computer terminals. Collecting mosquito bites always will go with the job, and there are still more places to do so, even in America, than some people think. They're generally the worse for wear, these places, but they're still alive, still holding up the biosphere, still part of what Wallace Stegner calls ''the geography of hope.'' B

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If William's effusions have a familiar ring to even the most urban sensibility, there is good reason. After its publication in 1791, Bartram's ''Travels'' was devoured by the generation of young European poets that included the author of ''Kubla Khan.'' Bartram supplied Coleridge, Wordsworth, Chateaubriand, and others with genuine examples of the exotic, Rousseau- esque wonders they hungered for - not only ''caverns measureless to man,'' but noble Creek warriors, lovely Cherokee maidens, flowery savannas, fragrant groves, brilliant birds.

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Classic and Modern Nature Poetry

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Nature Poems - Poems For Nature - - Poem by | Poem Hunter

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Nature poems written by famous poets. Browse through to read poems for nature. This page has the widest range of nature love and quotes.