Poetry is a form of art in which language is used for its aesthetic qualities, in addition to, or instead of, its ostensible meaning.

The following is provided as an overview of and introduction to poetry articles.

[edit] Essence of poetry

[edit] Types of poetry

[edit] Common poetic forms

Sonnet - Jintishi - Villanelle - Tanka - Ode - Ghazal - Haiku

[edit] Periods, styles and movements

For movements see List of poetry groups and movements.

Automatic poetry - Black Mountain - Chanson de geste - Concrete poetry - Cowboy poetry - Digital poetry - Ecopoetry - Epitaph - Erasure poetry - Fable - Flarf - Found poetry - Haptic Poetry - Imagism - Libel - Limerick poetry - Lyric poetry - Metaphysical poetry - Medieval poetry - Minnesinger - The Movement - Narrative poetry - Objectivist - Occasional poetry - Odes and Elegies - Parnassian - Pastoral - Performance poetry - Poetry slam - Post-modernist - Romanticism - San Francisco Renaissance - Sound poetry - Symbolism - Troubadour - Trouvère - Visual poetry - Painted Poems

[edit] History of poetry

Painted poems

[edit] General elements of poetry

Accents - Couplets - Elision - Feet - Intonation - Meter - Moras - Prosody - Rhythm - Scansion - Stanzas - Syllables - Caesura

[edit] Methods of creating rhythm

See also Parallelism, inflection, intonation, foot

[edit] Scanning meter

• spondee -- two stressed syllables together
• iamb -- unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable
• trochee -- one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable
• dactyl -- one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables
• anapest -- two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable

The number of metrical feet in a line are described in Greek terminology as follows:

• dimeter -- two feet
• trimeter -- three feet
• tetrameter -- four feet
• pentameter -- five feet
• hexameter -- six feet
• heptameter -- seven feet
• octameter -- eight feet

[edit] Common metrical patterns

• Iambic pentameter (John Milton, Paradise Lost^[1])
• Dactylic hexameter (Homer, Iliad;^[2] Ovid, The Metamorphoses)
• Iambic tetrameter (Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress")
• Iambic tetrameter (Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin)^[3]
• Trochaic octameter (Edgar Allan Poe, "The Raven")^[4]
• Anapestic tetrameter (Lewis Carroll, "The Hunting of the Snark";^[5] Lord Byron, Don Juan)^[6]
• Alexandrine, also known as iambic hexameter (Jean Racine, Phèdre)^[7]

[edit] Rhyme, alliteration and assonance

Alliteration - Alliterative verse - Assonance - Consonance - Internal rhyme - Rhyme

[edit] Rhyming schemes

Chant royal - Ottava rima - Rubaiyat

[edit] Stanzas and verse paragraphs

• 2-line stanza: couplet or distich
• 3-line stanza: triplet or tercet
• 4-line stanza: quatrain
• 5-line stanza: quintain or cinquain)
• 6-line stanza: sestet
• 8-line stanza: octet

• verse paragraph

[edit] Poetic diction

[edit] Poetics

• Figure of speech
• Stylistic device
• Rhetorical device
• Meter (poetry)
• Simile
• Metaphor
• Irony
• Surrealism
• Catachresis
• Allegory
• Allusion
• Imagery
• Symbolism
• Refrain

[edit] Famous poems and poets

• Anna Akhmatova
• Maya Angelou
• Ludovico Ariosto
• W. H. Auden
• Li Bai (李白)
• Basho (芭蕉松尾）
• William Blake
• Geoffrey Chaucer
• Samuel Coleridge
• Dante
• Kamala Das
• Emily Dickinson
• John Donne
• Rita Dove
• John Dryden
• T. S. Eliot
• Ferdowsi, "Shahnameh"
• Robert Frost
• Homer
• Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Horace
• Alfred Edward Housman
• Omar Kayyam
• John Keats
• Jan Kochanowski
• Ignacy Krasicki, Fables and Parables
• Mikhail Lermontov (Михаи́л Ю́рьевич Ле́рмонтов)
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• John Milton
• Ovid
• Petrarch
• Sylvia Plath Lady Lazarus
• Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven
• Alexander Pope
• Ezra Pound
• Alexander Pushkin (Алекса́ндр Серге́евич Пу́шкин)
• Rainer Maria Rilke
• Arthur Rimbaud
• Jalal ad-Din Rumi
• Shel Silverstein
• William Shakespeare
• Edmund Spenser
• Philip Sidney
• Tasso
• Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson
• Walt Whitman
• William Wordsworth
• Virgil
• William Butler Yeats

[edit] Poetry lists

• List of poems
• List of poets

[edit] See also

Poetry portal

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Find more about Poetry on Wikipedia's sister projects:

Definitions from Wiktionary
Textbooks from Wikibooks
Quotations from Wikiquote
Source texts from Wikisource
Images and media from Commons
News stories from Wikinews
Learning resources from Wikiversity

• Poems on Demand, Modern poetry
• Poetry Out Loud List of Poems
• Learning for a Cause, a non-profit educational organization that publishes the poetry and fiction of young writers under the age of eighteen.
• Poetry Collection, Poetry submitted by various poets.
• Poetry archives