Mandy Eve-Barnett's Blog for Readers & Writers

Poetry is literary work, which expresses feelings and ideas with special intensity through distinctive style and rhythm. It can be thought of in terms of different genres and sub-genres based on the subject matter, style, or other broader literary characteristics.

Narrative Poetry

The most famous examples include Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Both told stories through epic poetry. However, the term narrative poetry is more often attributed to smaller works with more appeal to human interest. Other narrative poetry is found in Scottish and English ballads and Baltic and Slavic heroic poems, which are performance poetry with roots in preliterate oral tradition. An interesting speculated point here is that the distinguishing features of poetry from prose, which include kennings and alliteration may once have been memory aids for the bards, who recited the traditional tales.

Other notable narrative poets are: Dante, William Langland, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Tennyson and Robert Burns.

Lyric Poetry

Unlike epic and dramatic poetry, lyrical poetry does not tell a story but is more personal in nature. These poems tend to be shorter, melodic and contemplative portraying the poet’s own feelings, perceptions and state of mind rather than depicting characters and actions.

Epic Poetry

This type is a major form of narrative literature. Often defined as lengthy poems regarding events of importance or heroic renown in the culture of the time. In a continuous narrative these poems recount the life and works of heroic or mythological characters. This type of poetry has become less common in the 20th century, although Derek Walcott’s epic, Omeros utilized the style.

Satirical Poetry

Using satire this style of poetry can be a powerful vehicle, often written for political purposes, such as in Roman times by Juvenal or John Dryden, a Tory in England or John Wilmot in the 17th century.

Elegy

The term elegy, originally denoted a type of poetic meter commonly describing a poem of mourning. Elegies are melancholy, mournful and plaintive – a lament for the dead or a funeral song, a reflection on a death or sorrow. However, they can also reflect something the author finds strange or mysterious.

Verse Fable

Fables are an ancient literary genre often set in verse. They are succinct stories featuring anthropomorphized animals, plants, inanimate objects or even forces of nature, which illustrate a moral lesson. (See: https://mandyevebarnett.com/2018/01/08/) Verse fables use a variety of rhyme and meter patterns. The most famous fabulist is Aesop.

Dramatic Poetry

This poetry is drama written in verse, which can be spoken or sung and is found in many cultures, such as Greek tragedy from the 6th century B.C. It may have influenced Sanskirt drama and Indian bianwen verse dramas in China. It is also found in Persian literature.

Speculative Poetry

Also known as fantastic poetry, of which macabre or weird poetry is a major sub-classification, this genre deals thematically with subjects ‘beyond reality’. Through  extrapolation in science or horror fiction, commonly appearing in magazines of those genres.

The ‘father of speculative poetry’ is of course, Edgar Allan Poe, whose Eureka: A Prose Poem anticipated the Big Bang theory.

Prose Poetry