Elegy:
The meter alternates
hexameter and pentameter lines. The mood is complaining, sad, melancholic,
lamenting, consoling, usually about the death of a person or for somber
meditations.
Sample authors:
Tennyson, Auden, Gray, Milton, Shelley, Arnold.
Free
Verse:
It has short lines,
not the continuity of prose. It has a more controlled rhythm than ordinary
prose. The concentration is on emotion, words, pace, and bucking conventional
patterns of poetry (re: stanzaic form, rhyme scheme, and meter)
Sample authors:
Whitman, Williams, Pound, Ginsberg, Cummings, Ferlinghetti.
Apostrophe:
A direct address either
to an absent person or to an abstract or inanimate object. The effect can
be highly formal or of a sudden emotional impetus. The addressee is not
intended to hear this.
Sample authors:
Keats, Coleridge, Milton.
Ode:
A long, lyric poem,
serious in subject, elevated in style, and elaborate in stanzaic structure,
line length, and rhyme scheme. Romantic odes deal in description, passion,
and meditation - perhaps attempting to solve either a private or human
problem.
Sample authors:
Worsworth, Cowley, Dryden, Gray, Keats, Shelley.
Ballad:
Popular - a song transmitted
orally which tells a story, much like folk tales passed down for generations.
Dramatic and impersonal, action and dialogue, it is devoid of the author's
personal feelings or attitudes. It is usually formatted in quatrain stanzas
in alternate four and three stress iambic lines - usually only the second
and fourth lines rhyme in each stanza.
Literary - appeared
mostly during the Romantic period as a deliberate imitation of the form
and spirit of the folk ballad.
Sample authors:
Guthrie, Dylan, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott,
Keats.
Lyric:
Any fairly short,
non-narrative poem presenting a single speaker who expresses a state of
mind or a process of thought and feeling (observation, thought, memory)
may be organized in a variety of ways.
Sample authors:
Shelley, Burns, Yeats, Arnold, (songwriters
in a non-narrative style like Eddie Vedder)
Blank
Verse:
Consists of lines
of iambic pentameter which are unrhymed. This is the closest to the natural
rhythms of speech and is most frequently used.
Sample authors:
Milton, T.S. Eliot, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Coleridge, W. Stevens.
Epic
(heroic poem):
A long, narrative
poem on a great and serious subject, told in an elevated style, centered
on a heroic or quasi-divine figure on whose actions depends the fate of
a tribe, a nation, or the human race.
Sample authors:
Homer, Milton, Vergil, Keats, Blake, Dante, Spenser.
Last
updated on July 8, 1998
Mary
Sauve