Irish poetry predates the spread of written language and was a mostly oral tradition for a long span of the region’s history. O, drama! never performed, never gossiped, never rhymed!īehold-to the blind beast, ever tearless, iron-hearted, the Heaven has no mouth to interpret these tidings!Īh, where is the man who lives out of himself?-the poet inspired often to chronicle theseĪwdl gywydd is a style of Irish verse consisting of rhymed quatrains that utilize interlaced couplets.Īs with many Irish forms, the style relies heavily on sounds and syllable counts, despite not being a metric poem form. Her dewy love-letters, strewn secretly upon the oat-carpets of the open field. The Wind, her lover, grey-haired in one moment, crazes around the Universe, hunting Love-mannered, mirroring her golden breast in silvery rivulets: Phantasmal mountain-mouth-kidnapped the maiden Moon, silence-faced, The inky-garmented, truth-dead Cloud-woven by dumb ghost alone in the darkness of “Where Is the Poet” is a beautiful example of an ars poetica poem written by Yone Noguchi, the first Japanese poet to ever publish English poetry. He’s astern – so go alight, crew, and win! David Shulman Ars PoeticaĪrs Poetica poems represent a declaration of the writer’s beliefs about poetry.Īrs Poetica remains one of the most influential poems in literary history, having been used as a metric by which to measure other poems since the Renaissance. AnagrammaticĪnagrammatic poetry is a very rare form of poetry in which every line of every stanza is an anagram of all other lines or stanzas in the poem.Īn example of an anagram would be “seal” and “sale.” These two words are anagrams of each other because they contain the same four letters.īelow is David Shulman’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, a sonnet that is also written in anagrammatic style. Here is an example of what that might look like in practice:īut then I need only choose to love again, Specifically, this means it is a poem with a specific moral, political, or spiritual message as its main purpose. Here’s an example, where the intended dunadh is emboldened.Īllegorical poetry refers to any poem in which allegory is a major element, but when calling an entire poem an “allegorical poem” we would usually understand it to mean that the entire poem is an allegory. In Irish poetry this technique is called dunadh. It was originally designed for oral traditions and features many of the hallmarks of early poetic design, such as an emphasis on rhyme and rhythm. The ae fraeslighe is an Irish form of poetry consisting entirely of rhymed quatrains. Below is an example that utilizes “Cat” as the word spelled out. The word used is often the subject being described by the remainder of the poem. William Butler Yeats AcrosticĪcrostic poems use the first letter of every line to spell out a word or phrase. It’s an excellent example of abstract poetry. Here’s an excerpt from Blood And The Moon, which was written by the classic poet William Butler Yeats. This is often referred to as the poem’s “aural quality.” For this reason, the genre is sometimes also referred to as sound poetry. Slithering snakes reappear from their densĪbstract poetry relies entirely on the sound the poem makes, rather than on the meanings of the individual words. Most fortunate, then, that such misfortune They are also called “ abecedarius” or an “ abecedary.” AbecedarianĪbecedarian poems consist of verses wherein the first letter of each line is a letter of the alphabet in succession.Ībecedarians are a form of acrostic poetry. So with a quiet understanding that you’re probably not going to remember all of these (feel free to favorite the page), let’s discuss some of the many, many different types of poems. Telling someone that you wrote a best-selling villanelle should fill you with a sense of pride because it’s brutally difficult to write a villanelle, much less a good one. It’s because researching different forms may give you an idea for a poem that you wouldn’t have had otherwise.Īlso, if you’re the pragmatic type, then there are some bragging rights associated with mastering a few different forms. The main reason to learn about all the forms out there isn’t so that you’ll remember every single one of them because you most likely won’t. You also do not need to memorize every single one of them to be a poet. While the sheer variety of structures, rhyme schemes, meters, and traditional forms associated with poetry may intimidate you, I have some good news that might help you stay motivated.Įvery form, at its core, is just a superficial thing that someone at one point or another made up to challenge themselves. 205 Zéjel All the Way Down the Rabbit Hole of Poem Types
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