Acrostic Poetry  June 23, 2007 - July 14, 2007

Show us what you got! Please submit your best Acrostic poems. Please note that poetry not in the appropriate format or with spelling errors will not be qualified. Be creative! :)

From Wikipedia: An acrostic (from the late Greek akr�stichon, from �kros, "top", and st�chos, "verse") is a poem or other writing in an alphabetic script, in which the first letter, syllable or word of each verse, paragraph or other recurring feature in the text spells out another message. A form of constrained writing, an acrostic can be used as a mnemonic device to aide memory retrieval.

The word acrostic was first applied to the prophecies of the Erythraean Sibyl, which were written on leaves and arranged so that the initial letters of the leaves always formed a word. This technique was later used to ingenious effect by Vladimir Nabokov in his story The Vane Sisters.

Acrostics may simply spell out the letters of the alphabet in order; these acrostics occur in the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and in certain of the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible. Two notable acrostic Psalms are the long Psalm 119, which typically is printed in subsections named after the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, each of which is featured in that section; and Psalm 145 (commonly referred to as "Ashrei"), which is recited three times a day in the Jewish services.

The ease of detectability of an acrostic can depend on the intention of its creator. In some cases an author may desire an acrostic to have a better chance of being perceived by an observant reader, such as the acrostic contained in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (where the key capital letters are decorated with ornate embellishments), or as in the poem To Doctor Empiric (by Ben Jonson). Giving emphasis to, and capitalising the key letters renders such acrostics relatively easier to discern. However, accrostics may also be used as a form of steganography, where the author seeks to conceal the message rather than subtly proclaim it. This might be achieved by making the key letters uniform in appearance with the surrounding text, or by aligning the words in such a way that the relationship between the key letters is less obvious. Acrostic ciphers were popular during the Renaissance, and could employ various different methods of encipherment, such as selecting other letters than initials based on a repeating patten (equidistant letter sequences), or even concealing the message by starting at the end of the text and working backwards.[1]

The Dutch national anthem (The William) is an acrostic: the first letters of its fifteen stanzas spell WiLLEM VAN NASSOV. This was one of the hereditary titles of William of Orange (William the Silent), who introduces himself in the poem to the Dutch people.

Stacy A. Foster

Indianapolis, IN

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Created Jun 23, 2007