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Dramatic poetry
The word “drama” implies one or more characters and action. Dramatic poetry aims at involving the reader in an experience or situation, and creates tension, immediacy, expectation, conflict. The speakers act out roles and therefore must not be identified with the poet. Many of John Donne’s lyrics represent vivid examples of dramatic poetry.
When one speaker only is involved and the poem is his/hers speech, we have the dramatic monologue. It aim is to get the reader to understand the personality and state of mind of the speaker, and thus sympathize with him/her. This form of composition was famous by poets like Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning and T.S. Eliot.
Lyrical poetry
This kind of poetry has, and has always had, the most appeal. As the name suggests, lyrical poetry was originally associated with music, and the term lyrical is till used to indicate a song accompanied by a musical instrument.
As Patrick Murray writes in Literary Criticism:
In general terms, it is its quality, its expression of individual thought and feeling that gives lyrical poetry its character. Ruskin defined it as “the expression by the poet of his own feelings”.
A lyric is a non-narrative poem, featuring a single speaker, whose purpose is to share a state of mind, a mood or attitude his reader.
It is easy to identify this speaker with the poet, especially when the poem reflects feelings and events that characterized the poet’s life (e.g Pascoli). However, what makes a poem significant as a work of art is the universal value of the emotion and concepts it expresses.
The ode
A rather long poem, elevated in tone and elaborated in style. It usually begins with an invocation and contains archaism. The subject is usually serious, and the concept conveyed is abstract.
The sonnet
A person of fixed form, in fourteen lines. It can be divided into an octave and sestet (Petrarchan form) or three quartrains and a couplet (Elizabethan form). It appeals to feelings directly and intensely. D.G Rossetti (a painter and a poet) defined it a moment’s monument.
The ballad
A poem narrative in kind and dramatic in style. It used to be transmitted in oral form, as a song. The metre was simple. Repetitions – of words, lines, or stanzas – are a typical feature of ballads. The stanza consists of four lines, rhyming ABCB. The ballad appealed especially to the poets of the Romantic period.
The pastoral
One of the oldest literary forms, which conventionally describes the life of shepherds and the idyllic aspects of rural life. It developed in classical times (3rd century BC) and was renewed in the Renaissance.
The elegy
Sorrowful poem or song written for someone who has died or something that is lost.
Besides these well established forms, any other poem of less than hundred lines, expressing an intense mood or feeling, can be defined a lyric.Poetic language refers to the language poets use to make their poems seem richer and more interesting and evocative. Poetic language often includes various literary devices, and is often more compact than the language used in prose.
Poetry is often regarded as a mystery, and in some respects it is one. No one is quite sure where poetry comes from, no one is quite sure exactly what it is, and no one knows, really, how anyone is able to write it.
The Greeks thought, or at least said, that it came from the Muse, but in our time no one has been able to find her. The unconscious has been offered as a substitute, but that, too, is hard to locate. How anyone is able to write it is explained in this way: the poet is a genius who receives inspiration.
One way to get a little more clarity on the subject was suggested to me by a remark of Paul Valéry’s. Thinking about what could be expressed in poetry but not elsewhere, he said that poetry was a separate language or, more specifically, a “language within a language.” There would be, in that case, the ordinary language—for Valéry French, for us English—and, somehow existing inside its boundaries, another: “the language of poetry.” Valéry let it go at that; he went on to talk about other things. I thought it worth taking literally and seeing where it might lead; I thought it might explain something important about how poems are written and how they can be read.
According to this idea, a poet could be described as someone who writes in the language of poetry. Talent is required for doing it well, but there are things that can help this talent to appear and to have an effect—for example, you have to learn this particular language, which you do by reading it and writing it. The language itself helps to explain inspiration, which is always, at a certain point in its development, the appearance of some phrase or sentence or other in the poetic language. You may be moved by the West Wind, but until the words come to you, “O wild West Wind,” the inspiration is still in an early, pre-verbal phase. Once “wild West Wind” is there, it leads to more of this oddly useful language; once the tone, the channel, the language level is found, the poem can take off in a more purely verbal way.
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