The following outline is provided as an overview of and introduction to poetry:
Poetry â€" a form of art in which language is used for its aesthetic qualities, in addition to, or instead of, its apparent meaning.
What type of thing is poetry?
Poetry can be described as all of the following things:
- One of the arts â€" as an art form, poetry is an outlet of human expression, that is usually influenced by culture and which in turn helps to change culture. Poetry is a physical manifestation of the internal human creative impulse.
- A form of literature â€" literature is composition, that is, written or oral work such as books, stories, and poems.
- Fine art â€" in Western European academic traditions, fine art is art developed primarily for aesthetics, distinguishing it from applied art that also has to serve some practical function. The word "fine" here does not so much denote the quality of the artwork in question, but the purity of the discipline according to traditional Western European canons.
Types of poetry
Common poetic forms
- Epic
- Sonnet
- Jintishi
- Villanelle
- Tanka
- Ode
- Ghazal
- Haiku
Periods, styles and movements
For movements see List of poetry groups and movements
- Augustan poetry
- Automatic poetry
- Black Mountain
- Chanson de geste
- Classical Chinese poetry
- Concrete poetry
- Cowboy poetry
- Digital poetry
- Epitaph
- Fable
- Found poetry
- Haptic Poetry
- Imagism
- Libel
- Limerick poetry
- Lyric poetry
- Metaphysical poetry
- Medieval poetry
- Minnesinger
- Modern Chinese poetry
- The Movement
- Narrative poetry
- Objectivist
- Occasional poetry
- Odes and Elegies
- Parnassian
- Pastoral
- Performance poetry
- Post-modernist
- Romanticism
- San Francisco Renaissance
- Sound poetry
- Symbolism
- Troubadour
- Trouvère
- Visual poetry
History of poetry
Elements of poetry
- Accents
- Couplets â€" a pair of lines of meter in poetry. It usually consists of two lines that rhyme and have the same meter. While traditionally couplets rhyme, not all do.
- Elision
- Foot
- Intonation
- Meter
- Mora
- Prosody
- Rhythm
- Scansion
- Stanza
- Syllable
- Caesura
Methods of creating rhythm
- See also Parallelism, inflection, intonation, foot
Scanning meter
- spondee â€" two stressed syllables together
- iamb â€" unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable
- trochee â€" one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable
- dactyl â€" one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables
- anapest â€" two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable
The number of metrical feet in a line are described in Greek terminology as follows:
- dimeter â€" two feet
- trimeter â€" three feet
- tetrameter â€" four feet
- pentameter â€" five feet
- hexameter â€" six feet
- heptameter â€" seven feet
- octameter â€" eight feet
Common metrical patterns
- Iambic pentameter
- Example: Paradise Lost, by John Milton
- Dactylic hexameter
- Examples:
- Iliad, by Homer
- The Metamorphoses, by Ovid
- Examples:
- Iambic tetrameter
- Examples:
- To His Coy Mistress, by Andrew Marvell
- Eugene Onegin, by Aleksandr Pushkin
- Examples:
- Trochaic octameter
- Example: The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe
- Anapestic tetrameter
- Examples:
- The Hunting of the Snark, by Lewis Carroll
- Don Juan, by Lord Byron
- Examples:
- Alexandrine â€" also known as iambic hexameter.
- Example: Phèdre, by Jean Racine
Rhyme, alliteration and assonance
- Alliteration
- Alliterative verse
- Assonance
- Consonance
- Internal rhyme
- Rhyme
Rhyming schemes
- Chant royal
- Ottava rima
- Rubaiyat
Stanzas and verse paragraphs
- 2-line stanza: couplet or distich
- 3-line stanza: triplet or tercet
- 4-line stanza: quatrain
- 5-line stanza: quintain or cinquain)
- 6-line stanza: sestet
- 8-line stanza: octet
- verse paragraph
Poetic diction
Poetics
Some famous poets and their poems
- Anna Akhmatova
- Maya Angelou
- Ludovico Ariosto
- W. H. Auden
- Li Bai
- Basho
- William Blake
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- Samuel Coleridge
- Dante
- Divine Comedy
- Kamala Das
- Emily Dickinson
- John Donne
- Rita Dove
- John Dryden
- T. S. Eliot
- Ferdowsi
- Shahnameh
- Robert Frost
- Mirza Ghalib
- Homer
- Iliad
- Odyssey
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
- Horace
- Alfred Edward Housman
- Omar Khayyám
- John Keats
- Jan Kochanowski
- Ignacy Krasicki
- Fables and Parables
- Mikhail Lermontov
- W.S. Merwin
- Czesław Miłosz
- John Milton
- Pablo Neruda
- Ovid
- Petrarch
- Sylvia Plath
- Lady Lazarus
- Edgar Allan Poe
- The Raven
- Alexander Pope
- Ezra Pound
- Alexander Pushkin
- Rainer Maria Rilke
- Arthur Rimbaud
- Jalal ad-Din Rumi
- Shel Silverstein
- William Shakespeare
- Shakespeare's sonnets
- Edmund Spenser
- Philip Sidney
- Tasso
- Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson
- Derek Walcott
- Walt Whitman
- William Wordsworth
- Virgil
- William Butler Yeats
See also
- Glossary of poetry terms
References
External links
- Poetry Out Loud List of Poems
- Poetry archives