Written with non-rhythmic iambic pentameter divisions, or stanzas, this form of verse was developed during the period of the Italian Renaissance. The formal structure consists of one unstressed and stressed syllable, or an iamb; one stressed and unstressed syllable, or a trochee; two unstressed and one stressed syllable, or an anapest; and then one stressed and two unstressed syllables, or a dactyl. William Shakespeare, Robert Frost and William Butler Yeats wrote some of the most prominent examples of blank verse. An excerpt from Frost's iambic "Mending Walls" reads:
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun...
This Japanese-derived poetry is written in only three lines consisting of five, seven and then five other syllables. Matsuo Basho was one of the pioneers of the art form, and his "Frog Haiku" established haiku as one of the most important literary developments in 1686:
Listen! A frog
Jumping into the stillness
Of an ancient pond.
The King James Version of the Bible, which was first published in the 17th century, laid the groundwork for poems written in non-metrical rhythm and irregular meter. T. S. Eliot, Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman were some of the most well-known writers of unconventional rhythmic, or free, verse. A passage from Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" reads:
All truths wait in all things
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon.
A form of fixed verse derived from the Italian word "sonetto," this style of poetry consists of 14 lines that are typically 5-feet-long iambics which rhyme according to a set method. Sir Thomas Wyatt introduced the Italian Petrarchan sonnet to England in the 16th century, and William Shakespeare developed his own sonnets during the same era. Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 reads like this:
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.