Taxonomy term
View poems listed by genre.
- AbecedarianA poem having verses where the words or lines begin with the successive letters of the alphabet.
- Abstract
- CinquainA five-line stanza of syllabic verse, the successive lines containing two, four, six, eight and two syllables. The cinquain, based on the Japanese haiku, was an innovation of the American poet, Adelaide Crapsey.
- ElegyA poem of lament, usually formal and sustained, over the death of a particular person; also, a meditative poem in plaintive or sorrowful mood, such as, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, by Thomas Gray. NOTE: The pastoral elegy became conventional in the Renaissance and continued into the nineteenth century. Traditionally, pastoral elegies included an invocation, a lament in which all nature joined, praise, sympathy, and a closing consolation, as in John Milton's Lycidas.
- EpitaphA brief poem or statement in memory of someone who is deceased, used as -- or suitable for -- a tombstone inscription; a commemorative lamentation.
- FableA poetic story that illustrates a moral or teaches a lesson, usually in which animals or inanimate objects are represented as characters.
- Free VerseA fluid form which conforms to no set rules of traditional versification. The free in free verse refers to the freedom from fixed patterns of meter and rhyme, but writers of free verse employ familiar poetic devices such as assonance, alliteration, imagery, caesura, figures of speech etc., and their rhythmic effects are dependent on the syllabic cadences emerging from the context . The term is often used in its French language form, vers libre. Walt Whitman's By the Bivouac's Fitful Flame is an example of a poem written in free verse. NOTE: Although as ancient as Anglo-Saxon verse, free verse was first employed "officially" by French poets of the symbolistic movement and became the prevailing poetic form at the climax of romanticism. In the 20th century it was the chosen medium of the imagists and was widely adopted by American and English poets. NOTE: The one characteristic that distinguishes free verse from rhythmical prose is that free verse has line breaks which divide the content into uneven rhythmical units.
- Haiku / Senryu / Tanka
- HymnA song or ode of praise, usually addressed to gods, but sometimes to abstractions such as Truth, Justice, or Fortune.
- Limerick
- OdeA type of lyric or melic verse, usually irregular rather than uniform, generally of considerable length, and sometimes continuous, sometimes divided in accordance with transitions of thought and mood in a complexity of stanzaic forms; it often has varying iambic line lengths with no fixed system of rhyme schemes and is always marked by the rich, intense expression of an elevated thought, often addressed to a praised person or object. NOTE: Two other important forms of the ode arose from classical poetry; (1) the Dorian or choric ode designed for singing, after which pindaric verse was patterned, and (2) the Aeolic or horatian ode, of which Ode to a Nightingale, considered to be one of John Keats' finest works, is an example. More commonly used in English poetry, however, is the irregular form described above and exemplified in Wordsworth's Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.
- Prose
- Song / Lyric
- SonnetA fixed form consisting of fourteen lines of five-foot iambic verse. In the English or Shakespearean sonnet, the lines are grouped in three quatrains (with six alternating rhymes) followed by a detached rhymed couplet which is usually epigrammatic. In the original italian form, such as Longfellow's Divina Commedia, the fourteen lines are divided into an octave of two rhyme-sounds arranged abba abba and a sestet of two additional rhyme sounds which may be variously arranged. This latter form tends to divide the thought into two opposing or complementary phases of the same idea. NOTE: A variant of the Shakespearean form is the Spenserian sonnet which links the quatrains with a chain or interlocked rhyme scheme, abab bcbc cdcd ee. NOTE: A sonnet sequence is a seies of sonnets in which there is a discernable unifying theme, while each one retains its own structural independence. All of Shakespeare's sonnets, for example, were part of a sequence.
