Acrostic

An acrostic is a poem in which the initial letters of the lines, read from top to bottom, form a word, name or whole phrase. The acrostic belongs to the visual-verbal forms in which the graphic arrangement of the text carries additional meaning beyond the verse content proper. Historically acrostics were used for a hidden authorial signature, a dedication to an addressee or the placing of a secret message, and also in the spiritual poetry of the Baroque. The difficulty of the form lies in a double constraint: the poet must at once create a full-fledged poem and observe the prescribed sequence of initial letters. Its varieties are the mesostich and telestich, where the key word is composed of the middle or final letters of the lines.