Poems are collections of words that express an idea or emotion that often use imagery and metaphor. As you are studying literature, you will likely notice that poems come in many, many different forms. As you read and perhaps write your own poems, it is helpful to know the different kinds of poems.
Types of Poems in English
There are many different types of poems in English. The difference between each type is based on the format, rhyme scheme and subject matter.
- Allegory (Time, Real and Imaginary by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
- Ballad (As You Came from the Holy Land by Sir Walter Raleigh)
- Blank verse (The Princess by Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
- Burlesque (Hudibras by Samuel Butler)
- Cacophony (The Bridge by Hart Crane)
- Canzone (A Lady Asks Me by Guido Cavalcanti)
- Conceit (The Flea by John Donne)
- Dactyl (The Lost Leader by Robert Browning)
- Elegy (Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard by Thomas Gray)
- Epic (The Odyssey by Homer)
- Epitaph (An Epitaph by Walter de la Mare)
- Free verse (The Waste-Land by TS Eliot)
- Haiku (How Many Gallons by Issa)
- Imagery (In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound)
- Limerick (There Was a Young Lady of Dorking by Edward Lear)
- Lyric (When I Have Fears by John Keats)
- Name (Nicky by Marie Hughes)
- Narrative (The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe)
- Ode (Ode to a Nightingale by Percy Bysshe Shelley)
- Pastoral (To a Mouse by Robert Burns)
- Petrarchan sonnet (London, 1802 by William Wordsworth)
- Quatrain (The Tyger by William Blake)
- Refrain (Troy Town by Dante Rosetti)
- Senryu (Hide and Seek by Shuji Terayama)
- Shakespearean sonnet (Sonnet 116 by Shakespeare)
- Sonnet (Leda and the Swan by William Butler Yeats)
- Tanka (A Photo by Alexis Rotella)
- Terza rima (Acquainted with the Night by Robert Frost)
About Some of the Types of Poems
Ballad
Are you familiar with the term “ballad”? You probably are, because people sometimes refer to songs-particularly romantic ones-as ballads. In fact, ballad poems are frequently sung-or at least they are intended to be sung-and they are often about love. Often, these ballads will tell stories and they tend to be of a mystical nature. As a song does, ballads tend to have a refrain that repeats at various intervals throughout.
Examples:
Guido Cavalcanti’s Ballad and Sir Walter Raleigh’s As You Came from the Holy Land both demonstrate the musical quality of the ballad. An excerpt from Raleigh’s poem can be seen here:
As you came from the holy land
Of Walsinghame,
Met you not with my true love
By the way as you came ?
How shall I know your true love,
That have met many one,
As I went to the holy land,
That have come, that have gone?
Imagery
We decided to place a focus on imagery poems because of the immense power that they possess. Many, many poems can be classified as imagery poems; however, some are better at the task than others. Individuals who often write imagery-based poems are known as Imagists.
Examples:
William Carlos Williams’ short poem The Red Wheelbarrow is a famous example of a short imagist poem:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
These types of poems in English work to draw a picture in the mind of the reader, in order to give an extremely powerful image of what the writer is talking about. They work to intensify the senses of the reader.
Because poems can express a wide variety of emotions, there are sad forms of poetry as well as happy ones. One of these sad forms is known as an elegy. Elegies express a lament, often over the death of a loved one. This makes elegies especially popular for funerals. Some elegies are written not only to be read out loud; they can be put to music and sung.
Tennyson’s In Memoriam is an elegy to a close friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, and was written over twenty years:
Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;
Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.
Free Verse
While it is easy to think that poems have to rhyme, free verse is a type of poetry that does not require any rhyme scheme or meter. Poems written in free verse, however, do tend to employ other types of creative language such as alliteration, words that begin with the same sound, or assonance, the repetition of vowel sounds. Some people find free verse to be a less restrictive type of poetry to write since it doesn’t have to employ the form or the rhyming schemes of other types of poetry. The free verse form of poetry became popular in the 1800s, and continues to be popular among poets even to this day.
Examples:
TS Eliot was one of the masters of the form, as best seen in his poems The Waste Land and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which begins:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming questionÉ.
Oh, do not ask, ÒWhat is it?Ó
Let us go and make our visit.
Sonnet
One of the most famous types of poetry, the sonnet, has been popular with authors from Dante to Shakespeare.
A sonnet contains 14 lines, typically with two rhyming stanzas known as a rhyming couplet at the end.
There are several types of sonnets, including:
Italian (also known as Petrarchan)Spenserian
English or Shakespearean Sonnet
Shakespeare, famous for writing more than 150 sonnets (including his popular Sonnet 138) is credited with creating for a form of the sonnet that enjoyed widespread popularity throughout England for hundreds of years. Sonnet 138 reads:
When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor’d youth,
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppress’d.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told:
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter’d be.
Reading and understanding these types of poems in English should help you to better analyze poetry that you come across and may even inspire you to write your own creative works.
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