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.
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 verse form.
Tanka –
Ode –
Ghazal –
Haiku –
Periods, styles 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 – 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.
List of years in poetry
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
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
Iambic pentameter
Example: Paradise Lost, by John Milton
Dactylic hexameter
Examples:
Iliad, by Homer
The Metamorphoses, by Ovid
Iambic tetrameter
Examples:
To His Coy Mistress, by Andrew Marvell
Eugene Onegin, by Aleksandr Pushkin
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
Alexandrine – also known as iambic hexameter.
Example: Phèdre, by Jean Racine
Rhyme, alliteration and assonance
Alliteration
Alliterative verse
Assonance
Consonance
Internal rhyme
Rhyme
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
Some famous poets and their poems
Anna Akhmatova
Requiem
Maya Angelou
On the Pulse of Morning
Ludovico Ariosto
Orlando Furioso
W. H. Auden
Musée des Beaux Arts
September 1, 1939
Matsuo Bashō
Natsu no Tsuki (Summer Moon)
Charles Baudelaire
Les Fleurs du Mal
William Blake
The Chimney Sweeper
The Sick Rose
London
Geoffrey Chaucer
The Complaint of Mars
Samuel Coleridge
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Dante
Divine Comedy
Kamala Das
The Descendants
Emily Dickinson
"Hope" is the thing with feathers
"Why do I love" You, Sir
"Faith" is a fine invention
John Donne
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
Elegy XIX: To His Mistress Going to Bed
Rita Dove
Thomas and Beulah (collection)
John Dryden
Absalom and Achitophel
Mac Flecknoe
T. S. Eliot
The Waste Land
Ferdowsi
Shahnameh
Robert Frost
The Road Not Taken
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Mirza Ghalib
Goethe
Homer
Iliad
Odyssey
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Binsey Poplars
Horace
Epistles (collection)
Victor Hugo
Les Contemplations
Alfred Edward Housman
To An Athlete Dying Young
Omar Khayyám
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Translated Collection)
John Keats
Sleep and Poetry
Jan Kochanowski
Laments (Translated Collection)
Ignacy Krasicki
Fables and Parables
Jean de La Fontaine
Mikhail Lermontov
Boyarin Orsha
Li Bai
Quiet Night Thought
Stéphane Mallarmé
L'après-midi d'un faune
W.S. Merwin
Czesław Miłosz
John Milton
Paradise Lost
Pablo Neruda
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Collection)
Ovid
Ars Amatoria (Collection)
Petrarch
Il Canzoniere (Collection)
Sylvia Plath
Lady Lazarus
Edgar Allan Poe
The Raven
Alexander Pope
The Rape of the Lock
Ezra Pound
The Cantos (Collection)
Alexander Pushkin
Ruslan and Ludmila
Rainer Maria Rilke
Duino Elegies (Collection)
Arthur Rimbaud
Le Bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat)
Jalal ad-Din Rumi
Masnavi
William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's sonnets
Shel Silverstein
Where the Sidewalk Ends (Collection)
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
Philip Sidney
The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia
Tasso
Jerusalem Delivered
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson
Break, Break, Break
The Charge of the Light Brigade
Tears, Idle Tears
François Villon
Virgil
Aeneid
Derek Walcott
Omeros
Walt Whitman
Song of Myself
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
William Wordsworth
The Prelude
William Butler Yeats
Sailing to Byzantium
Swift's Epitaph (Translation)
