In Mary Oliver’s “A Poetry Handbook,” she has a chapter called ‘Diction, Tone, Voice,’ in which she goes into great detail describing these things. The definition of diction is word choice, whereas the overall effect of the diction of a piece of writing is called tone. “The term voice is used to identify the agency or agent who is speaking through the poem, apart from those passages that are actual dialogue.” The persona is the voice, or speaker of the poem. The author states that an intended formality and metrical construction were part of the reason why American poetry had a sense of formality. Negative capability is an idea of Keats that the poet should be a “negative force” or sorts, allowing himself to understand the subject of his poem.
The lyric poem is most popularly used today and it is slightly brief. This type of poem is brief, concentrated on purely one subject, with a single voice, and will impose a natural musicality. Mary Oliver uses personification to describe this poetry: “It is not unlike a coiled spring, waiting to release its energy in a few clear phrases.” Poets still do write longer poems with a central idea, and poets have more recently started writing prose poems. These poems are too recent to have developed a tradition, so there is no set definition. The author also goes over poetic diction, The Cliché, Inversion, informational language, syntax, and variety versus habits. She states that when a poet has been writing for a long time, then they can go on to more complicated work.
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