Poetry is a type of writing that uses the shapes and sounds of words to add meaning. Poets play with rhyme and rhythm, and make clever use of language. Poems are not written in sentences and paragraphs like prose. Instead, they are laid out in lines and verses, sometimes called stanzas. The structure of a poem is called its form. Poems are often shorter than prose (writing that is not poetry) using a relatively small number of lines to convey what the poet wishes to say.

The sounds of words

A poet chooses each word carefully. There are a number of techniques. Assonance repeats a vowel sound across several words, for example, "Who are you, the man in blue?" Consonance repeats the same consonant, such as "humming and strumming his song". Alliteration is the repeated use of the same consonant at the beginning of words, such as "mean and moody monster". Onomatopoeia describes words that sound like the object or action, such as "zip" or "slurp".

Rhyme

Poems often (but not always) use rhyming words. They may appear at the end of lines, forming a pattern. A pair of rhyming lines is called a couplet, for example, "There was an old man, who drove a red van". Traditionally, poems followed set patterns of rhyme that were described with letters, so two couplets would be AABB. Alternately rhyming lines would be ABAB.

Rhythm and metre

Rhythm is the pattern of stresses that flow through the lines of a poem. It uses the syllables of each word to make a regular beat. Stresses are important in poetry. The word "midnight" has two syllables, with the stress on the first syllable: MIDnight. The word "collapse" also has two syllables but is stressed on the second one: colLAPSE. Traditional poems use set patterns of these stresses, known as metres. Many modern poets prefer to use free verse, which follows the patterns of natural speech, rather than using the musical elements of rhyme, rhythm and metre.

Types of poem

Poems are often categorized by their form. They may have a certain number of lines and rhyming pattern. Limericks, for example, always have five lines and the rhyming pattern AABBA. Sonnets, made famous by the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca, often known as Petrarch (1304–74), have 14 lines. English poets gave sonnets a new rhyme pattern and metre. William Shakespeare (1564–1616) wrote over 150 sonnets. He also wrote many of the speeches in his plays as blank verse, a type of poetry that has a set metre but no rhyme.

The Japanese haiku is a very short poem that uses only 17 syllables. Ghazal poems from the Middle East and South Asia are written in rhyming couplets, each of which ends in the same word. Chinese shi poems have up to eight lines and an established rhyming pattern and storytelling outline.

Other famous early narrative poems are the Iliad and the Odyssey, written by the Greek poet Homer in the 8th century BC—the oldest works of Western literature in existence. The first English-language poem is also an epic: Beowulf, written by an unknown Anglo-Saxon poet in the 8th century AD. One of the greatest works in all literature, the Divine Comedy, is an epic poem describing the poet's journey through Hell and eventually to Paradise, by Italian poet Dante Alighieri (c.1265–1321). In a dramatic poem, characters act out what is happening. Lyric poetry describes the poet’s feelings, rather than telling a tale. Lyric poems were originally written to be accompanied by a lyre, a musical instrument similar to a harp, giving the origin of the name.

Romantic poets

The Romantic poets wrote from the late 1700s to the early 1800s, and their poems were a reaction against the science-led Age of Enlightenment and the dawning Industrial Revolution. Instead, the Romantics celebrated nature and passionate emotions, with the emphasis on the individual rather than society. The Romantics included William Blake (1757–1827), Lord Byron (1788–1824), William Wordsworth (1770–1850), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) and John Keats (1795–1821).