Name: _____________________________________________

Section: ___________________________________________

CREATIVE WRITING
MODULE 5:
“Elements and Techniques on How to Write a Poem”
INTRODUCTION

Fig.1: Poetry

There are a lot of ways of to express someone’s opinion, they can express it through the
language by means of writing songs, stories, drawing and poems. The most popular is writing
poetries, where you can artistically create a story without writing the words literally, where you
can have meters, rhythms, and rhymes it really depends on your mood. You can write anything
that comes to your mind, and without minding the grammar.

Objectives:
In this lesson you should be able to:
 Discussed the meaning of literature and its types.
 Identify the differences of each type.
 Enumerate the different elements, structure and form of poetry.
 Create their own short poems.
 Appreciate the beauty and meaning of each poems from different poets.

Exploratory Activity
Given below are random words that we usually used. Give their denotative and
connotative meaning. Avoid using dictionary or browsing the internet.
 Example:
WORD DENOTATIVE CONNOTATIVE
(literal meaning) (emotion, the deep meaning)
Home Where a person lives Warmth, comfortable

WORD DENOTATIVE CONNOTATIVE

1. Blue
2. Heart
3. Dove
4. Dog
5. Tears

Learn About It

LITERATURE

LITERATURE – from the original term “litera” which means letter.

 It deals with ideas, thoughts, and emotions of man – thus it can be said that literature is
the story of a man.
 Its broadest sense, is everything that has ever been written.

MAIN DIVISIONS OF LITERATURE:

PROSE POETRY
Form Written in paragraph form Written in stanza or verse form
Language Expressed in ordinary language Expressed in metrical, rhythmical,
and figurative language
Appeal To the intellect To the emotion
Aim To convince, inform, instruct, Stir the imagination and set an ideal
imitate, and reflect of how life should be

And since our subject is Creative Writing we will focused this lesson on poetry and its
elements. And let’s see how poetry can make our lives more creative.
POETRY – derived from the Greek word”poesis” meaning “making or creating”.
 It is a kind of language that says it more intensely than ordinary language does.

Sample poem:

THERE IS NO FRIGATE LIKE A BOOK

BY EMILY DICKINSON

There is no Frigate like a Book

To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –
 Let’s Review!
1. What can you say about the poem? Or how did you understand it?

Things to Remember about Poetry:

1. Poetry is a concentrated thoughts.

2. Poetry is a kind of word-music.
3. Poetry expresses all the senses.
4. Poetry answers our demand for rhythm.
5. Poetry is observation plus imagination.

Poetry is varied as the nature of man-unique in some sense along with man’s eccentricities,
yet clings if appreciated or if deeply imbibed by the reader.

SOME OF THE BEST DEFINITIONS OF POETRY

Writers Definitions
1. Gemino Abad “A poem is a meaningful organization of words.”
2. T.S. Eliot “The fusion of two poles of mind, emotion and thoughts.”
3. Manuel Viray “Poetry is the union of thoughts and feelings.”
4. William Wordsworth “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
recorded in tranquility.”
5. Edgar Allan Poe “It is the rhythmic creation of beauty.”
6. Percy B. Shelley “It is the recorded of the best and happiest moments of the
happiest and best minds.”
7. Jaime G. Ang “Poetry is the ‘essence’ of the creative imagination of man.”

Let’s Review!
1. What is poetry in your own words?

2. What is the purpose of writing poetry?

3. Out of the given definition, which really caught your attention?

ELEMENTS OF POETRY
 1. Sense – is revealed through the meaning of words, images and symbols.
a. Diction – denotative and connotative meanings/symbols.
b. Images and sense impression – sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, motion, and
emotion.
c. Figure of speech – simile, metaphor, personification, apostrophe, metonymy,
synecdoche, hyperbole, irony, onomatopoeia, etc.
2. Sound – is the result of a combination of elements.
a. Tone color – alliteration, assonance, consonance, rhyme, repetition, and
anaphora.
b. Rhythm – ordered recurrent alteration of strong and weak elements in the flow of
the sound and silence: duple, triple, running, or common rhyme.
c. Meter – stress, duration, or number of syllables per line, fixed metrical pattern, or
a verse form: quantitative, syllabic, accentual and accentual syllabic.
d. Rhyme scheme – formal arrangement of rhymes in stanza or the whole poem.
3. Structure – refers to (1) arrangement of words, and lines to fit together, and (2) the
organization of the parts to a form a whole.
a. Word order – natural and unnatural arrangement of words.
b. Ellipsis – omitting some words for economy and effect.
c. Punctuation – abundance or lack of punctuation marks.
d. Shape – contextual and visual designs: jumps, omission of spaces,
capitalization, lower case.

Structure of Poetry

a. The Stanza – basically the poetic equivalent of a prose paragraph. They are series of
lines that are grouped together and separated from other groups of lines or stanzas by a
skipped line.

The most common stanzas:

o 2 lines are called a couplet
o 3 lines are called a tercet
o 4 lines are called a quatrain
o 5 lines are called a cinquain
o 6 lines are called a sestet, or occasionally a sexain
o 7 lines are called a septet
o 8 lines are called an octave

TYPES OF POETRY

1. Narrative Poetry
 a. Epic – a long narrative poem centering a hero and its great significance – like
war, conquest, etc.
Example: “Biag-ni-Lam-Ang” by Pedro Bukaneg
b. Metrical Romance – a narrative poem that tells a story of adventure, love, and
chivalry. The typical hero is a knight on a quest.
c. Metrical Tale – a narrative poem consisting usually of a single series of
connective events that are simple idylls or home tales, love tales, tales of the
supernatural or tales written for a strong moral purpose in verse form.
d. Ballad – the simplest type of narrative poetry. It is a short narrative poem telling
a single incident in simple meter and stanzas. It is intended to be sung.
e. Popular Ballad – a ballad of wide workmanship telling some simple incidents of
adventure, cruelty, passion, or superstition, an incident that shows the primary
instincts of man influenced by the restraint of modern civilization.
f. Modern or Artistic – created by a poet imitation of the folk ballad, makes use
(sometimes with considerable freedom) of many of its devices and conventions.
g. Metrical Allegory – an extended narrative that carries a second meaning along
with the surface story, Things and actions are symbolic.

2. Lyric Poetry
a. Ode – a lyric poem of some length serious in a subject and dignified in style. It is
the most majestic of the lyric poems. It is written in a spirit of praise of some
persons or things.
Example: Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”
b. Elegy – a poem written on the death of a friend of the poet, its purpose is to
praise the friend.
Example: The Lover’s Death by Ricardo Demetillo
c. Song – a lyric poem in a regular metrical pattern set to music. These have twelve
syllables (dodecasyllabic) and slowly sung to the accompaniment of a guitar or
banduria.
Example: Florante at Laura by Francisco Balagtas
d. Corridos (kuridos) – these have measures of eight syllables (octosyllabic) and
recited to a material beat.
Example: Ibong Adarna by Jose Dela Cruz (Huseng Sisiw)
e. Sonnet – a lyric poem containing fourteen iambic lines, and complicated rhyme.
Example: Santang Abad by Alfonso P. Santos

Wrapping Up
 Literature means written works that may pass through different generations, can be
classified into prose and poetry.
 We focused on poetry where it shows the creative side of writing, following different
structures, techniques, and forms to depend the topic that we want to focus.
  There are also some poems who don’t really follow such, they are more free flowing and
grammar is really not an issue as long as you can show your readers what the message
of your poem is.
 Also poetry is unique because we will never know what the real meaning behind every
lines, sometimes we are thinking deeply but the author just means the simplest or the
other way around.
 What’s important is the message we get once we read them, and the emotions we
shared in every lines.

Let’s Practice!
Activity 1: Who are you? Draw something that represents who you are, it can be things, food,
trees, animals, etc. Choose something that you can consider as symbol of who you really are.

Activity 2: Poem Writing. Based on your created symbol, create a poem that defines who you
are and at the same time you need to connect it to the picture you’ve drawn above. Observe
RHYME and METER, it must be 4 stanza and consist 4 lines each.
Photo Credits
Fig. 1: Poetry
https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/03/23/poetry-contest-makes-art-of-coronavirus-
unease/
Bibliography
Dr. Jaime Guttierez-Ang. Literature 101: Philippines Literatures: A Course Reader.
Mindshapers Co.,Inc. 2012

Elements of Poetry
https://www.literacyideas.com/elements-of-poetry

There’s no Frigate like a Book by Emily Dickinson

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52199/there-is-no-frigate-like-a-book-1286