Sidelight: The ubi sunt motif was popular in medieval poetry, such as Villon's "Des Dames du Temps Jadis"

Sidelight: The popular use of the word verse for a stanza or associated group of metrical lines is not in accordance with the best usage. A stanza is a group of verses.

Sidelight: While verse paragraphs are seldom used in rhymed verse, Lycidas, by John Milton, is a noteworthy exception.

(Compare Ditty)

Sidelight: Edgar Allan Poe's essay, "The Philosophy of Composition," describes the conception, construction, and versification of his poem, "The Raven."

Sidelight: Classical versification was based on quantity, with the words arranged to form a systematic succession of long and short syllables, but this began to decline under the Roman Empire; the Romance Languages, being accentual in character, gave rise to accentual verse, which stressed certain syllables instead of giving time quantities to them. The classical names of the metrical feet are commonly applied to modern poetic meter, an accented syllable being equivalent to a long syllable and an unaccented syllable to a short syllable.

(See Bard, Metrist, Poet, Sonneteer, Wordsmith)
(See also Doggerel, Poetaster, Poeticule, Rhymester)

Sidelight: The villanelle gives a pleasant impression of simple spontaneity, as in Edwin Arlington Robinson's "The House on the Hill."

Sidelight: Virelay is the Anglicized spelling of the French virelai, a variation of the lai.

Sidelight: While the term, visual poetry, is generally applied to the definition above, most poets consciously strive to influence the visual impact of their poems by their selection of line lengths, stanzaic structures, indentations, white space, punctuation, capitalization, and type styles. In traditional verse, though, these aspects are subordinate to the written text.