In my previous post, I discussed how language and poetry were fundamental to how our human species survived and passed knowledge forward to future generations. Today, we’re going to look at two aspects of poetic structure.

Poets must convey an entire story in as few words as possible, and so must authors of other stripes.

An obvious trope of poets that we who write novels must make good use of are (what I think of as) power words. If we choose words that both carry emotions and have visual impact, we don’t have to use as many to show the story.

Rhymes are foundational poetry. I Have Seen the Stars is a short poem written as a class exercise in a seminar on the poetry of William Butler Yeats.

1. We were limited to two stanzas of four lines each.
2. We were to use both hard and soft syllables.
3. We…