Types of Poems

Lyric

A short poem expressing personal emotions, focuses on one emotion.

Narrative

A form of poetry telling a story, combining storytelling elements with poetic devices like form, meter, and rhyme.

Odes

Formal lyric poems celebrating, appreciating, or dedicating to a specific subject, serious in tone, without strict line or stanza requirements.

Ballads

Poems telling stories in four-line stanzas, may have various rhyme schemes and meters, not limited to a specific structure.

Free Verse

Poetry without regular rhythm or rhyme patterns, flowing naturally like everyday speech, may contain rhythmic and sound effects.

Sestina

A complex French fixed form verse with six stanzas of six lines each and a three-line envoi, repeating end words in a specific pattern.

Elegy

A lyric poem meditating on death, often a tribute to the deceased, serious in tone and formal in diction.

Sonnet

14 lined poem, written in iambic pentameter. Consists of 3 quatrains​ and 1 couplet​. The typical rhyme scheme is​: abab cdcd efef gg​.

Blank verse

Iambic and pentameter

Iambic

*/

Trochee

/*

Anapest

**/

Dactyl

/**

Spondee

//

Pyrrhic

**

Monometer

1 foot

Dimeter

2 feet

Trimeter

3 feet

Tetrameter

4 feet

Pentameter

5 feet

hexameter

6 feet

Heptameter

7 feet

Octameter

8 feet