Poetry

Poetry
Kinds of Poetry
Lyric Poetry• is the most popular or the most familiar kind of poetry.
• It is closest to music, the ancient lyrics having been sung to the accompaniment of the lyre, whence its name.
• It is an expression of the poet’s own feeling—about love, nature, man or woman—in short about almost subject which may move her or him.
• Lyric is generally a short poem.
• Shakespeare, Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and more recently, William Butler Yeats are some of the great lyricists in English literature.
Ode• is a special kind of lyric, written in a dignified and elevated style.
Elegy• is a lament on the death of a person.
• The great elegies, however, go further than to mourn death. They often use the death of a person as a starting point from which they may proceed to a discussion of such matters as the meaning of death, life, and even the universe.
Narrative Poetry
• Like narrative prose, tells a story.
Epic
• An epic is a long narrative, usually in verse, dealing usually with the fabulous adventures of a national or mythological hero.
• Great Epics are: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Scandinavian eddas, the Tetonic sagas, and Anglo-Saxon Beowulf.
Ballad• is a short narrative poem, telling an actual folk story or a folk-like story in verse form.
• “The Twa Corbies” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well” are the popular folk ballads. And “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” by Oscar Wilde and Kipling’s “A Ballad of East and West” are the modern literary ballads.