Poetry, Its Kinds and Forms - With Definations and Examples

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Definitions of Poetry

1. Painting is silent poetry and poetry is painting with a gift of speech. (Simonides) - 2500 Years Ago

2. Poetry is the spontaneous outflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquillity.  (William Wordsworth) - 19th Century

3. Poetry is emotion, put into measure (Thomas Hardy) - 19th Century

4. Poetry is criticism of life. (Matthew Amold) - 19th Century

5. Poetry is a rhythmical form of words, which express imaginative, emotional and intellectual experience of a writer. (Clive Samson) - 20th Century

6. Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. (Samuel Johnson) 18th Century

7. Poetry is the rhythmic creation of beauty. (Edgar Allan Poe) 18th Century

8. Poetry is the best words in the best orders. (S. T. Coleridge) 18th Century

Types of Poetry

There are two major types of poetry:

1. Lyric Poetry or Subjective Poetry: In which a poet expresses his own feelings, ideas or emotions (Or it can be an imaginary character or an animal; expressing about itself)

2. Narrative Poetry or Objective Poetry: In which a poet pivots other persons' feelings, ideas or emotions. But are written in 1st and 3rd person pronoun. These poems are also beautified by the adulteration of dialogues. 

Types of Lyrical Poetry

There are three types of Lyrical or Subjective Poetry:

Ode

Ode is meant by address. It is an address to a person, to an animal or to other non-living objects like, wind, ocean or mountain etc.

Types

1 Pindaric Ode

A Greek poet, Pindar (about 2,500 years ago) is the father of Odes. His odes are in regular form as they follow a pattern of three stanzas, strophe, anti-strophe and epode. A person was appointed to read an ode and when he was presenting strophe, he had to walk from his standing position to the left side, while explaining arguments. Then he had to walk from left to right side of the stage, which is called anti-strophe, to express counter-arguments. Then he would walk to the central position of the stage, which is known as epode, in which he presented his balanced views or solutions to a certain topic that he was explaining.

2 Horatian Ode

This kind of ode followed the same stanza-structure as was trending in Pinder's ones. A Latin poet, Horace (about 65 B.C.), was the founder of this type of odes. Because it followed Pindaric Odes, it is regarded as a regular form.

3 Irregular Odes

These kinds of odes are free from strophe, anti-strophe and epode. But they follow the rule of arguments, counter-arguments and conclusion. P. B. Shelley has used this irregularity in his famous ode, Ode to the West Wind.

Examples:

1 Ode to the Nightengale (John Keats – Regular Ode)

2 Ode to the West Wind (P. B. Shelley – Irregular Ode)

3 Dejection an Ode (S. T. Coleridge)

Characteristics:

1 Subjectivity

2 Elevated Style

Sonnet

It's simple, a lyric poem, having only just 14 lines.

There are also three types of Sonnets:

1 Petrarchan Sonnets:

Sonnets were actually founded by an Italian poet, Petrarch. He is regarded as the Father of Sonnets. His sonnets were formed in octave and sestet stanzas, it means that his sonnets had one idea in the first 8 lines, while another idea was represented six remaining lines.

2 Spenserian Sonnets:

Spenserian sonnets followed three quatrains and a couplet stanza. The main difference between Shakespeare's sonnets and the Spenserian sonnets is the Spenserian ones follow a series of couplet links, interlinked between two quatrains, like abab, bcbc, cdcd.

3 Shakespearian Sonnets

Shakespeare was the first poet to change the structure of stanzas. He removed the bondage of sestets and octaves and changed it with three quatrains and a rhyming couplet. The rhyming scheme of his sonnets was abab, cdcd or ccdd.

Examples

When I have Fears by J. Keats

Ozymandias by P. B. Shelley

Should I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day by William Shakespeare

Characteristics of Sonnets

Subjectivity

Artificial

Complexity

Elegies or Mourning Songs

Elegies represent the grief of a poet or by a poet regarding a dismal situation. These kind of poems are also known as mourning songs. These lyrical poems are written at someone's death, on dealing with something gloomy or just expressing the sad feelings of a poet, as mentioned earlier.

Qualities

Subjective

Expression of emotions

Gloom

Examples

Elegies on the Countries (Thomas Gray)

Funeral Blues (Wysten Hugh Auden)

Lycidas (John Milton)

Types of Narrative Poetry

Like Lyric Poetry, Narrative Poetry holds three types as well.

Ballad

Ballad is like a story; structured in verse; uttered by a common person; noted by a highly-skilled literary person. It originated from folk stories. Its stanzas are arranged in quatrain form, while adopting the heroic couplet rhyme scheme. Because it, somehow, holds a musical tone in it, some repeated stanzas can also be seen, commonly known as refrains. As a ballad is a narration of a story, it also narrates the dialogues by other people. It is also known as a love song. Ballads follow the abab cdcd rhyme scheme

 

Qualities of Ballads

• Simplicity
• Dialogues
• Supernatural elements

Examples

• Mariner

 

Epic

 

A very long poem of someone's heroic deeds. It is composed of very serious but the grand topic, affecting not just a single person but the whole society or nation with someone's victories of defeats. An epic may hold an elevated style, means it may have a reference to the ancient gods. Greek people used to narrate the epics of their Greek gods before they knew about writing. They had been using their memorizing techniques to narrate that kind of beefy poem.

 

Examples

 

• Paradise Lost by John Milton
• Divine Comedy by Dante
• Mahabharata by Vyasa (The longest epic, having more than 90,000 lines and 18,00,000 words)

 

Types of Epic

• Folk epics (written by more than one poets or writers and focusing on many subjects)
• Literary epics (written by only one writer and may have a focus on one particular subject)
• Mock epics (epic by length and unepic by nature)

Characteristics of an Epic

• High seriousness
• Elevated theme
• Supernatural elements
• Objectivity

 

Idyll

 

Idyll is meant as "Little Picture of Landscape". While it is a short poem painting a peaceful picture of rustic life; dealing with no corruption of life found in cities. This poem is written in quite a simple style of poetry. Ancient idylls were adorned with supernatural elements to enhance the romantic picture or the scene of a village.

Qualities

• Simplicity
• Presence of Super-natural elements

Examples

• The First Step (Cavafy)
• The Queen Rose (Isabella)
• An Idyll on Dandaloo

Dramatic Poetry

That kind of poetry in which a story is narrated in a form of verse is called dramatic poetry. All the dramas were written in verse till the 19th century. Soliloquies and monologues were the main weapons to adorn the drama. All the Ancient Greek Dramas were also written in verse. This type of drama is a simultaneously lyric and narrative type of poetry. The narration of the story makes it narrative poetry while the presence of soliloquies and monologues defines it as lyric poetry.

 

Techniques:

1. Soliloquies
2. Monologues
3. Asides

Qualities of Dramatic Poems:

1. Revolution
2. Emotions
3. Ideas
4. Situations or scenes

Rhyme in Poetry

Likeness of sounds of words at the end of verses is known as Rhyme.

Arrangement of rhyme in stanzas is known as Rhyme Scheme and is denoted via small alphabetical letters, for example, aa, bb and ccc etc.

Kinds of Rhyme

There are three kinds of rhyme which are used in poetry:

1. Perfect Rhyme: These kinds of rhyming words have a close resemblance of sound and sight. For example, Glass, class
2. General Rhyme: This class of rhyme has an aural similarity but holds no visual likeness. For example, brought and not.
3. Eye Rhyme: Having likeness of sight but not of sound is known as Eye Rhyme. Through and though are some example of eye rhyme. 

Rhythm in Poetry

Rhythm is the only element which is necessary to shape a poem. A poem without rhythm is not an actual poem, it shall be regarded as prose (if it possesses a stout grammatical structure). A rhythm is a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, which help to strengthen and illustrate the meanings of important words.

 

Syllable

 

A syllable is the utterance of a word or a section of a compound word in a single breath. For instance, the word dog has one syllable: it is a monosyllabic word. Understand has three syllables, which are un-der-stand: it is a tri-syllabic word. A word is divided into syllables on the basis of the links between the vowels. For example, the word understand has been divided into three chunks of syllables via noticing the vowelly links I.e. un, der and stand.

 

Stressed and Unstressed Syllables

 

The syllables which are spoken softy are called unstressed syllables while the syllables which are uttered strongly are regarded as stressed syllables. For instant, the word understand has two unstressed syllables, un and der while the last one is stressed, stand. If the first two are stressed then this behaviour will ruin the pronunciation of that particular word. The stressed syllable is denoted with / and unstressed syllable Is denoted with an x mark.

 

A Foot

 

A collection of 2 or 3 stressed or unstressed syllables is known as a foot. Individual feet in a mono-stich are separated via | symbol.

 

A metre

 

A metrical metre in poetry is made of a collection of feet. 

Types of Rhythm in Poetry

There are five types of rhythmic patterns used in poetry:

1. Trochaic foot (trochee)

That type of foot starts from a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. Example: Poet

2. Iambic foot (iamb)

That type of foot starts from an unstressed and then by a stressed syllable. This rhythmic pattern is widely used in poems as iambic penta-metre. Example: Define

3. Dactylic foot (dactyl)

A foot made of a stressed and two unstressed syllables. Example: Poetry

4. Anapestic foot (anapest)

A foot made of two unstressed and a stressed syllable. Example: Understand

5. Spondaic foot (spondee)

A foot made of two stressed syllables. Example: Downtown

6. Pyrrhic foot

A foot made of two unstressed syllables. Example: To a green thought in a green shade (Andrew Marwell – The Garden)

Types of Stanzas

"Stanzas are like paragraphs but paragraphs of a verse. " Stanzas are categorized on the basis of the lines:

• 1 line stanza is called a mono-stich (pronounced as mono-stick)
• 2 line stanza is called a couplet
• 3 line stanza is called a tercet stanza. (If a tercet or a group of tercets end on a couplet is called a terza-rima. )
• 4 line stanza is called a quatrain. This type of stanza is used widely. 
• 5 line stanza is called a quintet. 
• 6 line stanza is called a sestet. 
• 7 line stanza is called a septet or a royal rhyme. 
• 8 line stanza is called an octave. 
• 9 line stanza is called a Spenserian Stanza. It consists of eight iambic pentameter lines and an iambic hexameter foot, formally known as an Alexandrian mono-stich.