In poetry, form refers to how a poem is shaped and structured. It focuses less on the words and their possible meaning and more on how the words look inside the poem. The length of a line, the presence of rhyme, the lack of rhyme, the number of stanzas are all issues that relate to form.

You might have heard the phrase “content versus form.” This refers to the relationship between what’s in the poem and the poem itself. Say you receive a gift in the mail. The gift comes in a cute box. In the world of poetry, that cute box is the form and the gift inside is the content. As with content versus form, the cute box and the gift have a relationship. If the box wasn’t so cute, maybe your thoughts about the corresponding gift would be altered. Yet they can also be separated. The cute box is distinct from the gift. Likewise, form is distinct from content.

Perhaps I should give you an example that relates directly to poetry. Say you have to write an essay on the form of Langston Hughes’ poem “I, Too.” You could talk about how the poem starts and ends with a one-line stanza. You could mention how the second and third stanzas are rather long. You could note how all of the lines are relatively short. Again, all of those issues relate to form. They connect to how Hughes’s poem looks, how he organized it, and how he built it.