Hands Which Cannot Write

Types of Poetry

Types of Poetry

— Neinhart Alcazar

   Poetry is a type of writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound and rhythm.

   A. Narrative Poetry - tells a story in a richly imaginative and rhythmical language.
   1. Epic - a long narrative poem divided into distinct parts and episodes bound together by a common relationship to some great hero, action, and time. Epics are single poems of exceeding dignity and power.
      Example: Paradise Lost by John Milton
   2. Metrical Romance - a long rambling love story in verse. It is written in a style that tells a story and has a happy ending.
   3. Ballad - a short narrative poem intended to be sung. It is usually a four-line stanza, alternating trimeter and tetrameter.
      Example: Ballad of the Gibbet by Francois Villon
   4. Metrical Tale - deals with emotion or phrase of life and its story is told in a simple, straightforward and realistic manner.
      Example: Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
   5. Limerick - a humorous poems with five lines. The first, second, and fifth lines must have seven to ten syllables while rhyming and having the same verbal rhythm. The third and fourth lines only have to have five to seven syllables, and have to rhyme with each other and have the same rhythm.
      Example: To Miss Vera Beringer by Lewis Carroll

   B. Lyric Poetry - expresses personal thoughts and feelings. It is a comparatively short, non-narrative poem in which a single speaker presents a state of mind or an emotional state.
   1. Ode - an extended poem usually complicated in a meter and stanza forms and always deals with a serious theme such as immortality.
      Example: Ode to a Grecian Urn by John Keats
   2. Elegy - is generally a poem of a subject and meditative nature. It contains the author's personal grief for one's loss, or simply be a meditation on death.
      Example: O Captain! My Captain! by Walt Whitman
   3. Song - short lyrics poem intended to be sung. It has that particularly melodious quality required by the singing voice.
    a. Secular songs - have non-religious themes.
      Example: Beautiful in White by Westlife
    b. Sacred songs - are songs in praise of God.
      Example: Lead Me Lord by Gary Valenciano
   4. Simple Lyric - is any short poem where the verse is especially musical or where there is a marked subjects or emotional tone.
   5. Sonnet - is a lyric poem distinguished by its exact form--fourteen iambic pentameter lines. It was originally a love poem which dealt with the lover's suffering and hope.
      Example: By The Creek by Paul McCann

   C. Dramatic Poetry - portrays life and character through action in powerful, emotion paced lines such as those in Shakespeare's plays.
     a. Poetic plays
   1. Comedy - a type of drama which aims primarily to amuse and ends happily.
   2. Tragedy - a type of drama in which the chief character undergoes a struggle which ends disastrously.
   3. Farce - is an exaggerated comedy based broadly on humorous situations.
   4. Historical play - is a drama that the materials of which are taken from lives of outstanding figures in history.
   5. Melodrama - is a play with sensational actions, sentimental love story, extravagant emotions and generally, a happy ending.

     b. Dramatic Monologue - is a poem in which one character speaks throughout, but the presence, actions, and even words of other characters are implied.

   D. Free-Verse - does not have any particular pattern of stress or number of syllables per line. It is a type of verse without regular metre, rhythmic effects and organisation.