What is a Villanelle? Like the classic star quilt pattern, a villanelle has a strict form, one that poets love to monkey with, but before you can mess with it, you need to understand what it is. In short, the villanelle is a nineteen-line poem with six stanzas: five tercets (three-line stanzas) and one ending quatrain (four-line stanza). The villanelle uses two refrains and a strict rhyme scheme, as described below. Villanelle Features While the form of the villanelle is quite structured, the...

The sestina is a highly complex thirty-nine line poem that uses repeating end words instead of a rhyming pattern.

Irony Defined Irony is one of those concepts that can be hard to nail down. It can be easily confused with sarcasm, satire, coincidence, and plain old bad luck. (Ironic, don’tcha think?) In this post, we'll explore what irony is and look specifically at irony in poetry. A basic definition of irony: A circumstance in which the actual is surprisingly different from the expected . (refer to photo above) LiteraryDevices.net : "Irony is a literary device in which contradictory statements or...