Library: Poetry by Credo Reference: Forms & Genres

Poetry Forms

Ballad: Topic Page
In literature, short, narrative poem usually relating a single, dramatic event. Two forms of the ballad are often distinguished—the folk ballad, dating from about the 12th cent., and the literary ballad, dating from the late 18th cent.
Blank verse
From The Bloomsbury Dictionary of English Literature
Verse which is unrhymed, and composed of lines which normally contain ten syllables and have the stress on every second syllable, as in the classical iambic pentameter.
Free verse
From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Poetry without metrical form. At the beginning of the 20th century, many poets believed that the 19th century had accomplished most of what could be done with regular metre, and rejected it.
Ode: Topic Page
A lyric poem, usually a fairly long one, with lines of different lengths and complex rhythms, addressed to a particular person or thing.
Poetry: Topic Page
Imaginative literary form, particularly suitable for describing emotions and thoughts. Poetry is highly ‘compressed’ writing, often using figures of speech to talk about one thing in terms of another.
Rondeau: Topic Page
A poem of 13 or sometimes 10 lines with only two rhymes, and with the first line used as a refrain after the eighth and thirteenth lines.
Sestina
From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
The most complicated of the verseforms initiated by the troubadours (q.v.), the s. is composed of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by an envoi (q.v.) of three lines, all of which are unrhymed.
Sonnet: Topic Page
A short poem with 14 lines of 10 or 11 syllables each and a regular rhyming pattern according to the scheme: the Italian sonnet consists of an octave and a sestet, whereas the English sonnet consists of three quatrains and ends with a rhyming couplet.
Triolet
From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
A French fixed form composed of eight lines and using only two rhymes, disposed in the following scheme: ABaAabAB (a capital letter indicates a repeated line).
Villanelle
From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
(from It. villanella, a rustic song, villano, a peasant). As known today, a 19-line poem with two rhymes and two refrain lines, in the form AJoA 2abAj abA2 abA¡ abA2 abA¡ A2, where capital letters indicate refrains. Fr. poet Théodore de Banville compared the interweaving a, b, and refrain lines to "a braid of silver and gold threads, crossed with a third thread the color of a rose."

Genres & Movements

Computer poetry
From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Also known as e-poetry, digital poetry, new-media poetry, hypertext poetry, and computer poetry, all but the last of which have been used more or less interchangeably. Whereas once computer poetry might have been assumed to denote combinatory texts automatically generated from the formal rules and logic of a computer program (a practice dating back to the 1950s), the shift to electronic poetry is indicative of the much wider spectrum of creative activity now taking place,
Concrete poetry: Topic Page
Poetry which conveys meaning through the physical arrangement of the words on the page as well as through the words themselves.
Imagism
From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
A school of poetry which flourished in England and America between 1912 and 1914 and emphasized the virtues of clarity, compression, and precision.
Modernism: Topic Page
Modernism is based on a concern with form and the exploration of technique as opposed to content and narrative. In literature, writers experimented with alternatives to orthodox sequential storytelling.
Narrative poetry
From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Narrative turns the raw material of story—the "telling" of a concatenation of events unfolding in linear time—into a (more or less) artful organization of those events that may complicate their chronology, suggest their significance, emphasize their affect, or invite their interpretation.
New Formalism
From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
A movement, largely in the U.S., that promoted the use of metrical verse technique and rhyme.
Performance poetry
From Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature
Performance poetry is largely known in the forms produced by Caribbean poets and African American poets, the latter clearly influenced by the radical politics of the 1950s/60s Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso and Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones).
Romanticism: Topic Page
A late 18c and early 19c movement in art, literature and music, characterized by an emphasis on feelings and emotions, often using imagery taken from nature, and creating forms which are relatively free from rules and set orders.
Transcendentalism: Topic Page
Transcendentalism was a series of new ideas that flourished among writers and philosophers in New England during the 19th century.