The craft
Language
A poem is made of words that have already been used by everyone. Your job is not to invent a private language. It is to put common words in an order that makes them strange again — exact, musical, and true.
Diction and register
Diction is word-choice; register is the social temperature of those words. “Heart” and “cardiac muscle” name related facts in different rooms. A poem can live in kitchen English, in legal English, in the English of a child, or in a collision of all three. Inconsistency of register is a tool when it is deliberate (a bureaucratic verb in a love poem can be devastating) and a leak when it is not.
Prefer the concrete. “Grief” is a category. “The unwashed mug on her side of the sink” is a place the reader can stand. Abstract nouns are not forbidden — they are expensive. Pay for them with images.
The sound of sense
English poetry is an acoustic art even on the silent page. Readers hear it with an inner voice. The following devices are not ornaments; they are how meaning arrives in the ear before it arrives in the intellect.
Alliteration
Repeated initial consonants: “the furrow followed free.” A little binds a line; a lot becomes a tongue-twister or a parody of Old English. Alliterate on stressed syllables if you want it to count.
Assonance
Repeated vowel sounds: “the rain in Spain.” Assonance is the secret glue of unrhymed verse. It makes free verse feel inevitable rather than arbitrary.
Consonance and sibilance
Repeated consonants anywhere in the word. A run of s sounds (sibilance) can hiss, soothe or sneer, depending on speed. Do not hunt for these in revision until the sense is right; then listen for the places the mouth already wants to echo.
Onomatopoeia — and its modest cousins
Words that imitate sound (crack, murmur, clang) are obvious. More useful is the quieter kinship between meaning and mouth-feel: thin vowels for slight things, long vowels for duration, plosives for impact. This is not a law. It is a tendency the language already has; you can lean into it or work against it.
Clock. Click. The kettle’s dry cough.Then rain, a long vowel on the glass.
Syntax
Syntax is the order of words in a sentence. Poets are allowed to invert it — “Silent, upon a peak in Darien” — but inversion that exists only to rescue a rhyme sounds like a crossword. Keep the sentence something a human could say, then let the line-breaks complicate it.
Sentence length is rhythm too. A page of identical medium sentences is beige. Mix a long, accumulating sentence with a fragment. The fragment will sound like a verdict.
Repetition
Anaphora repeats a word or phrase at the start of successive lines (“I have known…”). Epistrophe repeats at the end. Refrains return a whole line, as in a villanelle or a ballad. Repetition is incantation when the repeated unit gains meaning each time; it is padding when it does not. Change something — an image, a pronoun, a no that becomes a yes — on each return.
Cliché, received phrasing, “poetic” diction
Cliché is language that has finished thinking. “Eyes like stars,” “broken heart,” “dark night of the soul,” “tapestry of life”: the reader has already left the room. Equally deadly is the opposite vice — a diction that signals Poem by using “o’er,” “twixt,” and a lot of moonlight. Write the English you would dare to speak to a sharp friend, then heighten it by precision, not by costume.
Language without image is philosophy in short lines. Go next to Imagery, then test how those words sit on a beat in Rhythm.