Types of acrostic poem

“Acrostic” is a family name. The version taught in schools — first letters, one word, top to bottom — is the eldest child, but there are at least six others, some of them considerably stranger. Knowing them is useful for two reasons: they are ways out when the standard form is not working, and several of them are much easier to write than they look.

The standard acrostic

First letters, read downwards, spell the word. This is the form meant by “acrostic” with no qualifier, and it accounts for the overwhelming majority of acrostics ever written. Its advantages are obvious: the spine is visible, so the reader gets the pleasure of noticing immediately, and the constraint sits at the start of the line where you are freshest.

Everything on the how-to page and in the examples is this type.

Mesostic

The hidden word runs down the middle of the lines rather than the left edge. Each line contains the required letter at some agreed position, and the poem is usually typeset so the spine letters align vertically down the page, making a visible column of capitals in the middle of the text.

The form is associated above all with the composer John Cage, who wrote hundreds of mesostics, often by running source texts through chance procedures. Cage distinguished a strict rule of his own: between one spine letter and the next, the intervening letter must not appear — a constraint that turns the writing into something closer to puzzle-solving than composition.

Use it when you want the hidden word genuinely hidden, or when the visible left margin has to stay clean — in a printed dedication, say.

Telestich

The spine runs down the last letters of each line instead of the first. Much harder than it sounds, because you cannot decide where a line ends until you know what letter it must end on, which reverses the natural order of composition.

A poem that does both at once — first letters spelling one word, last letters spelling another — is a double acrostic, below.

Double and triple acrostics

A double acrostic hides two words: conventionally the first letters spell one and the last letters spell another. A triple acrostic adds a third down the middle. These were a Victorian magazine obsession, usually as puzzles rather than poems, and they are genuinely difficult — every line is pinned at both ends before you have thought of anything to put between them.

A gentler version, worth knowing: run the same word down both edges. On a short word this is achievable and looks like an enormous amount of effort.

Abecedarian

The spine is the alphabet itself. Line one begins with A, line two with B, and so on to Z — twenty-six lines, no name hidden, the constraint doing the work instead of a subject. The Poetry Foundation glossary lists it as a relative of the acrostic, and it is the oldest branch of the family: several poems in the Hebrew Bible are alphabetic acrostics, including Psalm 119, Lamentations, and the closing verses of Proverbs.

The classical rationale is completeness — a subject covered from A to Z, exhaustively — and a practical one: an alphabetic poem is easy to memorise and impossible to lose a verse from without someone noticing. Contemporary poets use it as a generative constraint; it forces you somewhere you would not otherwise go around the letters K, Q and X.

Use it when you want a long poem with a built-in structure, or as a writing exercise. Twenty-six lines is a substantial poem, and the last quarter is where it gets interesting.

Diagonal acrostic

The hidden letters step one position further into the line each time: first letter of line one, second letter of line two, third letter of line three, and so on. The word runs diagonally across the block of text like a word-search answer.

The famous instance is Edgar Allan Poe's A Valentine (1846), which conceals the name of the poet Frances Sargent Osgood by exactly this method, and taunts the reader about it inside the poem itself. Poe used the same trick again in An Enigma. The text of A Valentine is in the public domain and available from the Academy of American Poets if you want to try solving it.

Diagonal acrostics require lines of adequate and increasing length — you cannot put the fourteenth letter into an eight-letter line — which is why they tend to be written in long, loose measures.

Stanzaic acrostic

Instead of one letter per line, one letter per stanza: every stanza begins with the required letter, and the poem runs to as many stanzas as the word has letters. This is how the biblical alphabetic acrostics scale — Psalm 119 gives each Hebrew letter eight verses — and it is the most useful variant for anyone who wants a proper poem from a short word.

Use it when a five-letter name deserves more than five lines. Five stanzas of three lines is a real poem; five lines is a caption.

Which one to use

For anything you actually intend to give to a person, the standard acrostic remains the right answer. The others are worth knowing because they are escape routes: when a name will not yield to the front of the line, it will sometimes yield to the middle, or to a stanza break.