Types of Poems

Lyric

Lyric poetry refers to a short poem, often with songlike qualities, that expresses the speaker's personal emotions and feelings. Historically intended to be sung and accompany musical instrumentation, lyric now describes a broad category of non-narrative poetry, including elegies, odes, and sonnets.

• Focus on one emotion

• Intended to be sung

• Tends to be short

• Where the word "lyrics” comes from

Narrative                                                                                                                                                                             The narrative poem is a form of poetry that is used to tell a story. The poet combines elements of storytelling—like plot, setting, and characters—with elements of poetry, such as form, meter, rhyme, and poetic devices.

The narrative poem is the oldest form of poetry and one of the oldest forms of literature. Epics like The Iliad and the Odyssey, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and The Mahabharata are ancient and long narrative poem examples.

CHARACTERISTICS OF NARRATIVE POETRY

• An emphasis on storytelling: narrative poems convey plot, setting, characters, and other key elements of stories.

• Experimental language: the unexpected, experimental word choice in narrative poems should surprise, delight, awe, transfix, move, inspire, and/or captivate the reader.

• Non-linear story structure: narrative poems rarely follow a single narrative thread or linear structure. These poems might jump forward or backwards in time, start in the middle, or trace completely disparate events before stitching them into one unified story.

• Contemporaneous forms: you may have noticed that no two types of narrative poetry are written in the same way. Each has its own form, and that form is dependent on the poem’s story, the year it was written, and the region it was written in. Contemporary narrative poems tend to be free verse.

• Mythological elements: Most of the narrative poetry written in antiquity dwelled on mythology. Even some contemporary examples, like Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, is a retelling of Greek myth, though modern day verse novels aren’t uniformly interested in myth.

• Internal characterization: Many narrative poems focus on the internal. The poetic language of the form allows writers to capture thoughts, feelings, and internal challenges that prose might not properly capture. Modern novels in verse are usually told from the 1st person, or from a very limited 3rd person point of view.

Odes

An ode is a formal lyric poem that is written in celebration, appreciation, or dedication.

They are generally directed at a specific person, place, idea, or object. Unlike other forms of poetry, the ode does not have a strict line or stanza requirement.

Traditionally they aren’t very long but encompass a variety of other structures, such as the elegy and sonnet. Usually, the tone is serious, genuine, and reflective. The subject matter, as stated above, can vary but it is always something the poet feels deserves attention.

Ballads

• A ballad is a poem that tells a story, usually (but not always) in four-line stanzas (or verses) called quatrains. 

• There are many different types of ballads, and poems in this form may have any one of hundreds of different rhyme schemes (end words that rhyme) and meters (internal rhyme and length-more about this later).

Free Verse

• Free verse is poetry that does not contain regular patterns of rhythm or rhyme. 

• The lines in free verse often flow more naturally than do rhymed, metrical lines and thus achieve a rhythm more like that of everyday speech. 

• Although free verse lacks conventional meter, it may contain various rhythmic and sound effects, such as repetition of syllables or words. 

Sestina

A complex French fixed form verse, usually unrhymed, consisting of six stanzas of six lines each and a three-line envoi. The end words of the first stanza are repeated in a different order as end words in each of the subsequent five stanzas; the closing envoi contains all six words, two per line, placed in the middle and at the end of the three lines. The patterns of word repetition are as follows, with each number representing the final word of a line, and each row of numbers representing a stanza:

      1 2 3 4 5 6
      6 1 5 2 4 3
      3 6 4 1 2 5
      5 3 2 6 1 4
      4 5 1 3 6 2
      2 4 6 5 3 1
      (6 2) (1 4) (5 3)

Elegy

• An elegy is a specific type of lyric poem in which the speaker meditates about death and dying. 

• It is usually a tribute to those who have died and so the tone is serious and the diction is formal. 

• It is often a longer poem and somewhat impersonal.