The most basic element of a poem is the poetic foot. Poets group syllables into poetic feet. Different types of poetic feet exist: feet contain between two and four syllables, with two and, to a lesser extent, three syllable lines being the most common in English poetry. Common types of two-syllable poetic feet include iambs and trochees. An imab is a poetic foot that consists of an unstressed syllable followed a stressed syllable, while a trochee is just the opposite: a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable.
Poets organize poetic feet into lines, with the number of poetic feet in a line of poetry determining what type of line it is. Three, four and, especially, five foot lines are very common in English poetry. A combination of foot type and line length is called a poetic meter. Iambic pentameter, a meter used by Geoffrey Chaucer, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and John Milton, consists of five iambic feet, which means that lines of iambic pentameter are made up of ten syllables.
Poetic lines are divided into stanzas. A stanza consists of two or more lines of poetry. Critics often look at the structure of a poem's stanza when examining its rhyme scheme. Poems that feature rhyme are often mapped stanza by stanza. For instance, since soneteers often group their poems into four stanzas -- three four-line stanzas and one two-line stanza --, you can map the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet as follows: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame A
Is lust in action: and till action, lust B
Is perjur'd, murderous, bloody, full of blame, A
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust; B
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight; C
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had, D
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait, C
On purpose laid to make the taker mad: D
Mad in pursuit and in possession so; E
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; F
A bliss in proof,--- and prov'd, a very woe; E
Before, a joy propos'd; behind a dream. F
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well G
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. G
Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren and the other New Critics agreed with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's contention that the true measure of a poem's artistic merit was how well a small part of the poem works in relationship with the poem as a whole. A poem that succeeds according to New Critical standards would feature individual lines that worked well in the context of the stanzas in which they appeared, and, in turn, stanzas that worked well in the context of the entire poems of which they were a part.