Tag Archives: acrostic

I am tentatively venturing into the world of acrostic poetry.  Something I don’t have much confidence for, but I would like to explore it a bit more.

For those who are not in the know, acrostic poetry takes a form that is like this; 

Elizabeth it is in vain you say

“Love not”—thou sayest it in so sweet a way:

In vain those words from thee or L. E. L.

Zantippe’s talents had enforced so well:

Ah! if that language from thy heart arise,

Breathe it less gently forth—and veil thine eyes.

Endymion, recollect, when Luna tried

To cure his love—was cured of all beside—

His folly—pride—and passion—for he died.

As you can see a poetic line (I am not very good with jargon) starts with the first letter of a word in each sentence.  This was written by Edgar Allan Poe and it is called ELIZABETH.

It should flow well into each other, each line and remain within the subject matter which is the word you are working from.

There are many poetry competitions in the UK which specialise on only acrostic entries and most of those competitions offer prizes of £150 for the win – I have never taken the plunge to enter any creative writing competitions, but I am hoping to change this someday.

You will see a new category on my blog soon purely for acrostic poetry.

I also wanted to mention today in this post that I am no longer doing the Sunday word counts as I find it sometimes demoralising – especially when I don’t reach my 10k goal, for some reason or another making my failure public seem all the more worse.