Lit

• Edgar Allan Poe: 'Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words'
• Poetry


  Derived from a Greek word poesis meaning "making or creating"
• A poem differs from prose work in that it is to be read slowly, carefully, and attentively
• Reading a poem requires critical thinking, comprehensive imagination, analysis, and interpretative skills
• A poem recreates an experience for the reader
• The subject matter of poetry can be found in everything that interests the human mind
• A poem presents a dramatic situation with sound effects devices, figurative languages, and other elements unique to poetry
• Lyric Poetry


  • Meant to be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre, expresses emotions and feelings of the poet, may have one speaker presenting thoughts or feelings
• Lyric Poetry


  • Concerns feelings and emotion, includes elegy, ode, sonnet, and dramatic monologue, expresses the speaker's thoughts or feelings
• Narrative Poetry


  • Tells a story in verse, presents a narrative with a plotline as told by a narrator, includes epic, mock-epic, ballad
• Narrative Poetry


  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere", Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
• Descriptive Poetry


  • Detailed description of the world that surrounds the speaker, explores sensory experience by evoking all five senses, includes elaborate imagery and adjectives
• Descriptive Poetry


  • Elaborate imagery and adjectives
• Dramatic Poetry


  • Elaborate imagery and adjectives
• At the Fishhouses, Elizabeth Bishop


  • Although it is a cold evening, down by one of the fishhouses an old man sits netting, his net, in the gloaming almost invisible, a dark purple-brown, and his shuttle worn and polished. The air smells so strong of codfish it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.
• Dramatic Poetry


  • It is a poem where a story is told through the verse dialogue of the characters and a narrator. Also called a dramatic verse
• Types of Poetry


  • Lyric Poetry
  • Narrative Poetry
  • Descriptive Poetry
  • Dramatic Poetry
• Types of Poetry Forms

  • Elegy
  • Sonnet
  • Ode
• Elegy is a lyric poem which expresses feelings of grief and melancholy, and whose theme is death. It reflects upon death or loss, containing themes of mourning, loss, reflection, redemption, and consolation
• O Captain! My Captain! By Walt Whitman


  • O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies Fallen cold and dead.
• Sonnet is a 14 line poem, typically concerning the topic of love, containing internal rhymes within their 14 lines with rhyme schemes like ababcdcdefefgg
• Sonnet 18 By William Shakespeare

  • Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date; Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
• Ode is an elaborate lyric, expressed in language dignified, sincere, and imaginative and intellectual in tone. It is a lengthy lyric poem of serious subject in dignified style, most majestic of the lyric poems
• Ode


  • Elaborate lyric, expressed in dignified, sincere, and imaginative language
  • Lengthy lyric poem of serious in subject in dignified style, written in a spirit of praise of some persons or things
  • Poem of noble feeling, expressed with dignity, with no definite syllables or definite number of lines in a stanza
• Ode To My Pearl Of The Orient Seas (Philippines)


  • Traveling miles to the desert coast- free golden Arabia. I felt the snowy humid air, her dusty wind. Encircled with her thousand luxury cars, I begun to miss thee; motherland.
• Epic


  • Long narrative poem of the largest proportions
  • Detail extraordinary feats and adventures of characters from a distant past
  • Tale centering about a hero concerning the beginning, continuance, and the end of events of great significance
• Beowulf


  • Heroic poem considered the highest achievement of Old English literature and the earliest European vernacular epic. It deals with events of the early 6th century and was probably composed c. 700–750. It tells the story of the Scandinavian hero Beowulf, who gains fame as a young man by vanquishing the monster Grendel and Grendel’s mother; later, as an aging king, he kills a dragon but dies soon after, honoured and lamented. Beowulf belongs metrically, stylistically, and thematically to the Germanic heroic tradition but shows a distinct Christian influence.
• Ballad


  • Simplest and shortest type of narrative poetry
  • Short narrative poem telling a single incident in similar meter and stanzas, intended to be sung
• Rhymed verse


  • Rhymed poems rhyme by definition, although their scheme varies
• Free verse


  • Poetry that lacks a consistent rhyme scheme, metrical pattern, or musical form
• Blank verse


  • Poetry written with a precise meter—almost always iambic pentameter—that does not rhyme
• Mending Wall (Excerpt)


  • Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again
• Haiku


  • only one guy and only one fly trying to make the guest room do
• Limerick


  • Hickory, dickory, dock. The mouse ran up the clock. The clock struck one, The mouse ran down, Hickory, dickory, dock.
• Pastoral


  • Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove, That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields, Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
• Speaker: 'Speech: “To be, or not to be, that is the question”'
• Speech: “To be, or not to be, that is the question”
• Speaker: 'William Shakespeare'
• Soliloquies


  Allow dramatists to communicate information about a character’s state of mind, hopes, and intentions directly to an audience
• Villanelle is a nineteen-line poem consisting of five tercets and a quatrain, with a highly specified internal rhyme scheme