Key to Poetic Forms — Poetry at Harvard
Harvard University (Poetry at Harvard)
Harvard's poetry program organizes accentual-syllabic forms by stanza length, from tercets through fourteen-line stanzas, giving the rhyme scheme and metrical shape of each. Functions as an identification key for determining what form a poem is written in. Solves a problem no glossary solves: glossaries are alphabetical, so they only help once you already know the form's name. This inverts the lookup — you count lines and rhyme letters and arrive at the form. It also states its own limit up front (it describes what forms look like, not what they mean).
More resources on Poetic Forms
Poetry Off the Shelf
Producer Helena de Groot talks to poets about language, dreams, love and loss, identity, connection, anger, discomfort, the creative process, the state of the world and the world of the soul. Hard conversations are welcomed—laughter is, too.
poets.org
Poets.org is the official site of the Academy of American Poets. It features a large collection of poems and poet bios, plus audio readings, essays, and classroom resources for readers and educators.
Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets' glossary of poetic terms, with short definitions and example poems for forms such as the sonnet and villanelle and devices such as iambic pentameter, so you can identify and name what a poem is doing.
Poetry Foundation Glossary
Roughly 250 entries covering literary devices, poetic forms and movements, each defined concisely and many linking to fuller pages with example poems and essays. Lets a reader check unfamiliar critical vocabulary against actual poems rather than abstract definitions.
Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse, Fourth Edition
Short guide in which every meter, rhyme scheme, and stanza form is illustrated by an original poem that describes itself while demonstrating its own structure. Covers the sonnet, villanelle, sestina, ballad stanza, and other fixed forms. The fastest working entry into forms: because each example enacts the form it defines, the rule and the demonstration are the same object, so nothing has to be held in memory abstractly.
The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Fifth Edition
Encyclopedic handbook cataloging hundreds of English and borrowed verse forms, each with schematic notation and an example. Includes the rules of scansion and a Form-Finder Index that locates forms by line count and stanza pattern. 448 pages. The completeness tier — ghazal, double dactyl, clerihew, Welsh and Japanese forms, plus odd and invented ones, all under one notation system with the Form-Finder Index for reverse lookup.