Specific poetic forms have been developed by many cultures. In more developed, closed or "received" poetic forms, the rhyming scheme, meter and other elements of a poem are based on sets of rules, ranging from the relatively loose rules that govern the construction of an
elegy to the highly formalized structure of the
ghazal or
villanelle. Described below are some common forms of poetry widely used across a number of languages. Additional forms of poetry may be found in the discussions of poetry of particular
cultures or periods and in the
glossary.
[edit] Sonnet
Among the most common forms of poetry through the ages is the
sonnet, which by the 13th century was a poem of fourteen lines following a set rhyme scheme and logical structure. A sonnet's first four lines typically introduce the topic. A sonnet usually follows an a-b-a-b rhyme pattern. The sonnet's conventions have changed over its history, and so there are several different sonnet forms. Traditionally, in sonnets English poets use
iambic pentameter, the
Spenserian and
Shakespearean sonnets being especially notable. In the
Romance languages, the
hendecasyllable and
Alexandrine are the most widely used meters, though the
Petrarchan sonnet has been used in Italy since the 14th century. Sonnets are particularly associated with love poetry, and often use a poetic diction heavily based on vivid imagery, but the twists and turns associated with the move from octave to sestet and to final couplet make them a useful and dynamic form for many subjects.
Shakespeare's sonnets are among the most famous in English poetry, with 20 being included in the
Oxford Book of English Verse.
[66] The relative prominence of a poet or set of works is often measured by reference to inclusion in the
Oxford Book of English Verse or the
Norton Anthology of Poetry.
[edit] Jintishi
The
jintishi (近體詩) is a Chinese poetic form based on a series of set tonal patterns using the
four tones of
Middle Chinese in each couplet: the level, rising, departing and entering tones. The basic form of the
jintishi has eight lines in four couplets, with parallelism between the lines in the second and third couplets. The couplets with parallel lines contain contrasting content but an identical grammatical relationship between words. Jintishi often have a rich poetic diction, full of
allusion, and can have a wide range of subject, including history and politics. One of the masters of the form was
Du Fu, who wrote during the
Tang Dynasty (8th century). There are several variations on the basic form of the
jintishi.
[edit] Sestina
The sestina has six stanzas, each comprising six unrhymed lines, in which the words at the end of the first stanza’s lines reappear in a rolling pattern in the other stanzas. The poem then ends with a three-line stanza in which the words again appear, two on each line.
[edit] Villanelle
The
Villanelle is a nineteen-line poem made up of five triplets with a closing quatrain; the poem is characterized by having two refrains, initially used in the first and third lines of the first stanza, and then alternately used at the close of each subsequent stanza until the final quatrain, which is concluded by the two refrains. The remaining lines of the poem have an a-b alternating rhyme. The villanelle has been used regularly in the English language since the late 19th century by such poets as
Dylan Thomas,
[67] W. H. Auden,
[68] and
Elizabeth Bishop.
[69] It is a form that has gained increased use at a time when the use of received forms of poetry has generally been declining.
[citation needed]
[edit] Pantoum
The pantoum is a rare form of poetry similar to a villanelle. It is composed of a series of quatrains; the second and fourth lines of each stanza are repeated as the first and third lines of the next.
[edit] Rondeau
The rondeau was originally a French form, written on two rhymes with fifteen lines, using the first part of the first line as a refrain.
[edit] Roundel
The roundel form, said to have been devised by
Swinburne, consists of nine lines plus a refrain after the third line and after the last line, the refrain being identical with the beginning of the first line.
Tanka is a form of unrhymed
Japanese poetry, with five sections totalling 31
onji (phonological units identical to
morae), structured in a 5-7-5 7-7 pattern. There is generally a shift in tone and subject matter between the upper 5-7-5 phrase and the lower 7-7 phrase. Tanka were written as early as the
Nara period by such poets as
Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, at a time when Japan was emerging from a period where much of its poetry followed Chinese form. Tanka was originally the shorter form of Japanese formal poetry, and was used more heavily to explore personal rather than public themes. It thus had a more informal poetic diction. By the 13th century, tanka had become the dominant form of Japanese poetry, and it is still widely written today. The 31-mora rule is generally ignored by poets writing literary tanka in languages other than Japanese.
Haiku is a popular form of unrhymed Japanese poetry, which evolved in the 17th century from the
hokku, or opening verse of a
renku. Generally written in a single vertical line, the haiku contains three sections totalling 17
onji (see above, at Tanka), structured in a 5-7-5 pattern. Traditionally, haiku contain (1) a
kireji, or cutting word, usually placed at the end of one of the poem's three sections; and (2) a
kigo, or season-word. The most famous exponent of the haiku was
Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694). An example of his writing:
[70]
- 富士の風や扇にのせて江戸土産
- fuji no kaze ya oogi ni nosete Edo miyage
- the wind of Mt. Fuji
- I've brought on my fan!
- a gift from Edo
[edit] Ruba'i
Ruba'i is a four-line verse (
quatrain) practiced by Arabian, Persian, Urdu,
Azerbaijani (
Azeri) poets. Famous for his
rubaiyat (collection of quatrains) is the Persian poet
Omar Khayyam. The most celebrated English renderings of the
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam were produced by
Edward Fitzgerald; an example is given below:
- They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
- The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep:
- And Bahram, that great Hunter—the Wild Ass
- Stamps o'er his Head, and he lies fast asleep.
Sijo is a short musical lyric practiced by
Korean poets. It is usually written as three lines, each averaging 14-16
syllables, for a total of 44-46 syllables. There is a pause in the middle of each line and so, in English, a
sijo is sometimes printed in six lines rather than three. An example is given below:
- You ask how many friends I have? Water and stone, bamboo and pine.
- The moon rising over the eastern hill is a joyful comrade.
- Besides these five companions, what other pleasure should I ask?
Odes were first developed by poets writing in ancient Greek, such as
Pindar,
[71] and Latin, such as
Horace. Forms of odes appear in many of the cultures that were influenced by the Greeks and Latins.
[72] The ode generally has three parts: a
strophe, an
antistrophe, and an
epode. The antistrophes of the ode possess similar metrical structures and, depending on the tradition, similar rhyme structures. In contrast, the epode is written with a different scheme and structure. Odes have a formal poetic diction, and generally deal with a serious subject. The strophe and antistrophe look at the subject from different, often conflicting, perspectives, with the epode moving to a higher level to either view or resolve the underlying issues. Odes are often intended to be recited or sung by two choruses (or individuals), with the first reciting the strophe, the second the antistrophe, and both together the epode. Over time, differing forms for odes have developed with considerable variations in form and structure, but generally showing the original influence of the Pindaric or Horatian ode. One non-Western form which resembles the ode is the
qasida in
Persian poetry.
[edit] Ghazal
The ghazal (
Arabic: ghazal,
Persian: ghazel,
Turkish/
Azerbaijani: gazel,
Urdu: gazal,
Bengali/
Sylheti: gozol) is a form of poetry common in
Arabic,
Persian,
Turkish,
Azerbaijani,
Urdu and
Bengali poetry. In classic form, the ghazal has from five to fifteen rhyming couplets that share a
refrain at the end of the second line. This refrain may be of one or several syllables, and is preceded by a rhyme. Each line has an identical meter. Each couplet forms a complete thought and stands alone, and the overall ghazal often reflects on a theme of unattainable love or divinity. The last couplet generally includes the signature of the author.
As with other forms with a long history in many languages, many variations have been developed, including forms with a quasi-musical poetic diction in
Urdu. Ghazals have a classical affinity with
Sufism, and a number of major Sufi religious works are written in ghazal form. The relatively steady meter and the use of the refrain produce an incantatory effect, which complements Sufi mystical themes well. Among the masters of the form is
Rumi, a 13th-century
Persian poet who lived in
Konya, in present-day Turkey.
[edit] Acrostic
An acrostic (from the late Greek akróstichon, from ákros, "top", and stíchos, "verse") is a poem or other form of writing in an alphabetic script, in which the first letter, syllable or word of each line, paragraph or other recurring feature in the text spells out another message. A form of constrained writing, an acrostic can be used as a mnemonic device to aid memory retrieval.
A famous acrostic comes from the acclamation, "Jesus Christ, God's son, savior," which in Greek is: "Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ ͑Υιός, Σωτήρ",
Iēsous Christos, Theou Huios, Sōtēr. The initial letters of each word spell
ichthys, the Greek word for fish; hence the frequent use of the fish as a symbol for Jesus Christ.
The
Jewish devotional prayer
Ashrei has lines beginning with each of the letters of the
Hebrew alphabet in turn, implying that Jews ought to praise God with each letter of the alphabet. Likewise, the prayer
Ashamnu, recited on
Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), lists sins beginning with each letter of the alphabet, emphasizing the breadth and universality of wrongdoing.
[edit] Canzone
Literally "song" in Italian, a canzone (plural: canzoni) (cognate with English to chant) is an Italian or Provençal song or ballad. It is also used to describe a type of lyric which resembles a madrigal. Sometimes a composition which is simple and songlike is designated as a canzone, especially if it is by a non-Italian; a good example is the aria "Voi che sapete" from
Mozart's
Marriage of Figaro.
[edit] Cinquain
While "quintain" is the general term applied to poetic forms using a 5-line pattern, there are specific forms within that category that are defined by specific rules and guidelines. The term "CINQUAIN" (pronounced SING-cane, the plural is "cinquains") as applied by modern poets most correctly refers to a form invented by the American poet Adelaide Crapsey. The first examples of these were published in 1915 in The Complete Poems, roughly a year after her death. Her cinquain form was inspired by Japanese haiku and Tanka (a form of Waka).
[edit] Other forms
Other forms of poetry include:
[edit] Genres
In addition to specific forms of poems, poetry is often thought of in terms of different
genres and subgenres. A poetic genre is generally a tradition or classification of poetry based on the subject matter, style, or other broader literary characteristics.
[73] Some commentators view genres as natural forms of literature.
[74] Others view the study of genres as the study of how different works relate and refer to other works.
[75]
Epic poetry is one commonly identified genre, often defined as lengthy poems concerning events of a heroic or important nature to the culture of the time.
[76] Lyric poetry, which tends to be shorter, melodic, and contemplative, is another commonly identified genre. Some commentators may organize bodies of poetry into further subgenres, and individual poems may be seen as a part of many different genres.
[77] In many cases, poetic genres show common features as a result of a common tradition, even across cultures.
Described below are some common genres, but the classification of genres, the description of their characteristics, and even the reasons for undertaking a classification into genres can take many forms.
[edit] Narrative poetry
Narrative poetry is a genre of poetry that tells a
story. Broadly it subsumes
epic poetry, but the term "narrative poetry" is often reserved for smaller works, generally with more appeal to
human interest.
Narrative poetry may be the oldest type of poetry. Many scholars of
Homer have concluded that his
Iliad and
Odyssey were composed from
compilations of shorter
narrative poems that related individual episodes and were more suitable for an evening's entertainment. Much narrative poetry—such as
Scots and
English ballads, and
Baltic and
Slavic heroic poems—is
performance poetry with roots in a preliterate
oral tradition. It has been speculated that some features that distinguish poetry from prose, such as meter,
alliteration and
kennings, once served as
memory aids for
bards who recited traditional tales.
Notable
narrative poets have included
Ovid,
Dante,
Juan Ruiz,
Chaucer,
William Langland,
Luís de Camões,
Shakespeare,
Alexander Pope,
Robert Burns,
Fernando de Rojas,
Adam Mickiewicz,
Alexander Pushkin,
Edgar Allan Poe and
Alfred Tennyson.
[edit] Epic poetry
Main article:
Epic poetryEpic poetry is a genre of poetry, and a major form of
narrative literature. It recounts, in a continuous narrative, the life and works of a
heroic or
mythological person or group of persons. Examples of epic poems are
Homer's
Iliad and
Odyssey,
Virgil's
Aeneid, the
Nibelungenlied,
Luís de Camões'
Os Lusíadas, the
Cantar de Mio Cid, the
Epic of Gilgamesh, the
Mahabharata,
Valmiki's
Ramayana,
Ferdowsi's
Shahnama,
Nizami (or
Nezami)'s
Khamse (Five Books), and the
Epic of King Gesar.
While the composition of
epic poetry, and of
long poems generally, became less common in the west after the early 20th century, some notable epics have continued to be written.
Derek Walcott won a
Nobel prize to a great extent on the basis of his epic,
Omeros.
[78]
[edit] Dramatic poetry
Dramatic poetry is
drama written in
verse to be spoken or sung, and appears in varying, sometimes related forms in many cultures. Verse drama may have developed out of earlier oral epics, such as the Sanskrit and Greek epics.
[79]
Greek tragedy in verse dates to the 6th century B.C., and may have been an influence on the development of Sanskrit drama,
[80] just as Indian drama in turn appears to have influenced the development of the
bianwen verse dramas in China, forerunners of
Chinese Opera.
[81] East Asian verse dramas also include
Japanese Noh.
Examples of dramatic poetry in
Persian literature include
Nezami's two famous dramatic works,
Layla and Majnun and
Khosrow and Shirin,
[82] Ferdowsi's tragedies such as
Rostam and Sohrab,
Rumi's
Masnavi,
Gorgani's tragedy of
Vis and Ramin,
[83] and
Vahshi's tragedy of
Farhad.
[edit] Satirical poetry
Poetry can be a powerful vehicle for
satire. The punch of an
insult delivered in
verse can be many times more powerful and memorable than that of the same insult, spoken or written in
prose. The
Romans had a strong tradition of satirical poetry, often written for
political purposes. A notable example is the Roman poet
Juvenal's
satires, whose insults stung the entire spectrum of
society.
The same is true of the English satirical tradition. Embroiled in the feverish politics of the time and stung by an attack on him by his former friend,
Thomas Shadwell (a
Whig),
John Dryden (a
Tory), the first
Poet Laureate, produced in 1682
Mac Flecknoe, one of the greatest pieces of sustained invective in the English language, subtitled "A Satire on the True Blue Protestant Poet, T.S." In this, the late, notably mediocre poet,
Richard Flecknoe, was imagined to be contemplating who should succeed him as ruler "of all the realms of Nonsense absolute" to "reign and wage immortal war on wit."
Another master of 17th-century English satirical poetry was
John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester. He was known for ruthless satires such as "A Satyr Against Mankind" (1675) and a "A Satyr on Charles II."
Another exemplar of English satirical poetry was
Alexander Pope, who famously chided
critics in his
Essay on Criticism (1709).
Dryden and
Pope were writers of
epic poetry, and their satirical style was accordingly epic; but there is no prescribed form for satirical poetry.
The greatest satirical poets outside England include
Poland's
Ignacy Krasicki,
Azerbaijan's
Sabir and
Portugal's
Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage, commonly known as Bocage.
[edit] Lyric poetry
Main article:
Lyric poetry is a genre that, unlike
epic poetry and
dramatic poetry, does not attempt to tell a story but instead is of a more
personal nature. Rather than depicting
characters and actions, it portrays the poet's own
feelings,
states of mind, and
perceptions. While the genre's name, derived from "
lyre", implies that it is intended to be
sung, much lyric poetry is meant purely for
reading.
Though lyric poetry has long celebrated love, many
courtly-love poets also wrote lyric poems about war and peace, nature and nostalgia, grief and loss. Notable among these are the 15th century French lyric poets,
Christine de Pizan and
Charles, Duke of Orléans.
Spiritual and
religious themes were addressed by such
mystic lyric poets as
St. John of the Cross and
Teresa of Ávila. The tradition of lyric poetry based on spiritual experience was continued by later poets such as
John Donne,
Gerard Manley Hopkins,
Antonio Machado and
T. S. Eliot.
Though the most popular form for western lyric poetry to take may be the 14-line
sonnet, as practiced by
Petrarch and
Shakespeare, lyric poetry shows a bewildering variety of forms, including increasingly, in the 20th century,
unrhymed ones. Lyric poetry is the most common type of poetry, as it deals intricately with an author's own emotions and views.
Others take on a more free style pattern, without any clear pattern. This can be said of rap lyrics, poetry with a beat.
An
elegy is a mournful, melancholy or plaintive poem, especially a
lament for the dead or a
funeral song. The term "elegy," which originally denoted a type of poetic meter (
elegiac meter), commonly describes a poem of
mourning. An elegy may also reflect something that seems to the author to be strange or mysterious. The elegy, as a reflection on a death, on a sorrow more generally, or on something mysterious, may be classified as a form of
lyric poetry. In a related sense that harks back to ancient poetic traditions of sung poetry, the word "elegy" may also denote a type of musical work, usually of a sad or somber nature.
Elegiac poetry has been written since antiquity. Perhaps the first example of the form is II Samuel, Chapter 2, in which David laments the fall of King Saul and Saul's son and heir Jonathan. Notable practitioners have included
Propertius (lived ca. 50 BCE – ca. 15 BCE),
Jorge Manrique (1476),
Jan Kochanowski (1580),
Chidiock Tichborne (1586),
Edmund Spenser (1595),
Ben Jonson (1616),
John Milton (1637),
Thomas Gray (1750),
Charlotte Turner Smith (1784),
William Cullen Bryant (1817),
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1821),
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1823),
Evgeny Baratynsky (1837),
Alfred Tennyson (1849),
Walt Whitman (1865),
Louis Gallet (lived 1835–98),
Antonio Machado (1903),
Juan Ramón Jiménez (1914),
William Butler Yeats (1916),
Rainer Maria Rilke (1922),
Virginia Woolf (1927),
Federico García Lorca (1935),
Kamau Brathwaite (born 1930).
[edit] Verse fable
The
fable is an ancient, near-ubiquitous
literary genre, often (though not invariably) set in
verse. It is a succinct story that features
anthropomorphized animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that illustrate a moral lesson (a "
moral"). Verse
fables have used a variety of
meter and
rhyme patterns;
Ignacy Krasicki, for example, in his
Fables and Parables, used 13-
syllable lines in rhyming
couplets.
Notable verse
fabulists have included
Aesop (mid-
6th century BCE),
Vishnu Sarma (ca.
200 BCE),
Phaedrus (
15 BCE–
50 CE),
Marie de France (
12th century),
Robert Henryson (fl.1470-1500),
Biernat of Lublin (1465?–after 1529),
Jean de La Fontaine (1621–95),
Ignacy Krasicki (1735–1801),
Félix María de Samaniego (1745–1801),
Tomás de Iriarte (1750–1791),
Ivan Krylov (1769–1844) and
Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914). All of
Aesop's
translators and successors owe a debt to that semi-legendary
fabulist.
An example of a verse fable is
Krasicki's "
The Lamb and the Wolves":
- Aggression ever finds cause if sufficiently pressed.
- Two wolves on the prowl had trapped a lamb in the forest
- And were about to pounce. Quoth the lamb: "What right have you?"
- "You're toothsome, weak, in the wood." — The wolves dined sans ado.
[edit] Prose poetry
Main article:
Prose poetry is a hybrid genre that shows attributes of both prose and poetry. It may be indistinguishable from the
micro-story (
aka the "
short short story", "
flash fiction"). It qualifies as poetry because of its conciseness, use of
metaphor, and special attention to language.
[citation needed]
While some examples of earlier prose strike modern readers as poetic, prose poetry is commonly regarded as having originated in 19th-century
France, where its practitioners included
Aloysius Bertrand,
Charles Baudelaire,
Arthur Rimbaud and
Stéphane Mallarmé.
The genre has subsequently found notable exemplars in various languages:
- Bengali: Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore
- English: Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Allen Ginsberg, Giannina Braschi, Seamus Heaney, Russell Edson, Robert Bly, Charles Simic, Joseph Conrad
- French: Max Jacob, Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge, Jean Tardieu, Jean-Pierre Vallotton.
- Greek: Andreas Embirikos, Nikos Engonopoulos
- Italian: Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Umberto Saba
- Polish: Bolesław Prus, Zbigniew Herbert
- Portuguese: Fernando Pessoa, Mário Cesariny, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Walter Solon, Eugénio de Andrade, Al Berto, Alexandre O'Neill, José Saramago, António Lobo Antunes
- Russian: Ivan Turgenev, Regina Derieva, Anatoly Kudryavitsky
- Spanish: Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Octavio Paz, Giannina Braschi, Ángel Crespo, Julio Cortázar, Ruben Dario, Oliverio Girondo, Aníbal Cristobo.
- Swedish: Tomas Tranströmer
- Sindhi language: Narin Shiam, Hari Dilgeer, Tanyir Abasi, Saikh Ayaz, Mukhtiar Malik, Taj Joyo
- Punjabi language: Ali Arman
- Urdu language: Ali Arman
Since the late 1980s especially, prose poetry has gained increasing popularity, with entire journals devoted solely to that genre.
