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The following outline is provided as an overview of and introduction to poetry:
Poetry – a form of art in which language is used for its aesthetic qualities, in addition to, or instead of, its apparent meaning.
Poetry can be described as all of the following things:
- One of the arts – 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 – literature is composition, that is, written or oral work such as books, stories, and poems.
- Fine art – 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.
Common poetic forms
- Epic – lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Milman Parry and Albert Lord have argued that the Homeric epics, the earliest works of Western literature, were fundamentally an oral poetic form. These works form the basis of the epic genre in Western literature.
- Sonnet – poetic form which originated in Italy; Giacomo da Lentini is credited with its invention.
- Jintishi – literally "Modern Poetry", was actually composed from the 5th century onwards and is considered to have been fully developed by the early Tang dynasty. The works were principally written in five- and seven-character lines and involve constrained tone patterns, intended to balance the four tones of Middle Chinese within each couplet.
- Villanelle – nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines. The villanelle is an example of a fixed versed form.
- Tanka – a classical Japanese poem, composed in Japanese (rather than Chinese, as with kanshi)
- Ode – a poem written in praise of a person (e.g. Psyche), thing (e.g. a Grecian urn), or event
- Ghazal – an Arabic poetic form with rhyming couplets and a refrain, each line in the same meter
- Haiku – a poem, normally in Japanese but also in other languages (particularly English), normally with 17 syllables arranged as 5 + 7 + 5
- Free verse - an open form of poetry which does not use consistent meter patterns or rhyme, tending to follow the rhythm of natural speech
Periods, styles and movements
- Augustan poetry – poetry written during the reign of Caesar Augustus as Emperor of Rome, particularly Virgil, Horace, and Ovid.
- Automatic poetry – Surrealist poetry written using the automatic method.
- Black Mountain – postmodern American poetry written in the mid-20th century, in Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
- 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
- Microstory
- Minnesinger
- Modern Chinese poetry
- Modernist poetry
- The Movement
- Narrative poetry
- Objectivist
- Occasional poetry
- Odes and elegies
- Parable
- Parnassian
- Pastoral
- Performance poetry
- Post-modernist
- Prose poetry
- Romanticism
- San Francisco Renaissance
- Sound poetry
- Symbolism
- Troubadour
- Trouvère
- Visual poetry
History of poetry – the earliest poetry is believed to have been recited or sung, such as in the form of hymns (such as the work of Sumerian priestess Enheduanna), and employed as a way of remembering oral history, genealogy, and law. Many of the poems surviving from the ancient world are recorded prayers, or stories about religious subject matter, but they also include historical accounts, instructions for everyday activities, love songs, and fiction.
- Accents
- Caesura
- Couplets – 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
Methods of creating rhythm
Scanning meter
- spondee – two stressed syllables together
- iamb – unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable
- trochee – one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable
- dactyl – one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables
- anapest – two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable
The number of metrical feet in a line are described in Greek terminology as follows:
- dimeter – two feet
- trimeter – three feet
- tetrameter – four feet
- pentameter – five feet
- hexameter – six feet
- heptameter – seven feet
- octameter – eight feet
Common metrical patterns
- Iambic pentameter
- Example: Paradise Lost,[1] by John Milton
- Dactylic hexameter
- Examples:
- Iliad,[2] by Homer
- The Metamorphoses, by Ovid
- Examples:
- Iambic tetrameter
- Examples:
- Trochaic octameter
- Example: The Raven,[4] by Edgar Allan Poe
- Anapestic tetrameter
- Examples:
- Alexandrine – also known as iambic hexameter.
- Example: Phèdre,[7] by Jean Racine
Rhyme, alliteration and assonance
Rhyming schemes
Stanzas and verse paragraphs
Poetic diction
Poetics
- Anna Akhmatova
- Maya Angelou
- Ludovico Ariosto
- W. H. Auden
- Matsuo Bashō
- Charles Baudelaire
- William Blake
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- Samuel Coleridge
- Dante
- Kamala Das
- Emily Dickinson
- John Donne
- Rita Dove
- John Dryden
- T. S. Eliot
- Ferdowsi
- Robert Frost
- Mirza Ghalib
- Goethe
- Homer
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
- Horace
- Victor Hugo
- Alfred Edward Housman
- Omar Khayyám
- John Keats
- Jan Kochanowski
- Ignacy Krasicki
- Jean de La Fontaine
- Mikhail Lermontov
- Li Bai
- Stéphane Mallarmé
- W.S. Merwin
- Czesław Miłosz
- John Milton
- Pablo Neruda
- Ovid
- Petrarch
- Sylvia Plath
- Edgar Allan Poe
- Alexander Pope
- Ezra Pound
- Alexander Pushkin
- Rainer Maria Rilke
- Arthur Rimbaud
- Jalal ad-Din Rumi
- William Shakespeare
- Shel Silverstein
- Edmund Spenser
- Philip Sidney
- Tasso
- Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson
- François Villon
- Virgil
- Derek Walcott
- Walt Whitman
- William Wordsworth
- William Butler Yeats
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