There are various types of poetry.

1. Poetical
Types
by
LaxmikantKapgate

2.  Ballad
Meaning & Origin
 A ballad is a song that tells a story
 Communicate orally among illiterate or partly literate people
 word derived from the late Latin and Italian ‘ballare ‘to dance’
 arises out of folk literature
 Accomplishment of a harp or a fiddle by a strolling singer or a
band of singer
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3.  Ballad
Historical Context
Many of the popular ballads that are originated in the Middle
Ages were collected and printed in England and Germany during
18th century.
 Notable collections were Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient
Poetry(1765) Francis J Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballad
(1882-98) and Bertrand H. Bronson’s The Traditional Tunes of the
Child ballad(1959-72)
 More recent folk singer such as Woodie Guthrie, Bob Dylan and
Joan Beaz themselves compose ballads.
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4.  Ballad: Two types
1) Popular or Folk Ballad or Ballad of Growth or Authentic Ballad
 Originally composed by a single author (mostly unknown) but is
changed in content and tune by each singer who repeated it.
Features:
 The folk ballad is dramatic and impersonal.
 The narrator of the folk ballad starts the story with a climatic
scene and tells it without self reference or the expression of
personal attitude or feelings.
 in the words of W. H. Hudson, “as literary development of the
traditional form.” kapgate.laxmi

5.  Ballad: Two types
1) Literary Ballad or Ballad of Art
 narrative poem written in imitation or the form, language and spirit of
the popular ballad
Features:
Uses the stanza form, which is quatrain in alternate four and three
stress iambic lines and usually only the second and fourth lines rhyme
 Uses third person narrative, curtly sketched action and setting, sharp
transition and dialogue
 Might employ set formulae such as stock descriptive phrases like “
blood red wine”, a refrain in each stanza and incremental repetition, in
which line or stanza is repeated kapgate.laxmi

6.  Ballad:
Major practitioners and text
 Walter Scott’s Eve of St. John
 S T Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient mariner
 John Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Marcy
 Cowper’s John Gilpin
 Goethe’s Erlkonig
 G A Bergers’s Lenore
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7.  Elegy
Meaning & origin
 a Poem written in elegiac verse dactylic (alternating) hexameter and dactylic
pentameter lines (one long syllable and two short, six time in the first line, and five
times in the second)
 dealing with the theme of change, loss, complaints about love or mourning
the death of a person or even sober meditations on death and mortality
 In Greek and Roman literature, ‘Elegy’ denotes any poem written in elegiac
metre
 It had the subject matter of change and loss frequently expressed in elegiac
verse for, especially in complaints about love.
 Nowadays, takes its name from its subject matter, not, from its form.
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8.  Elegy
Historical Context
 Some of the Old English poems that deal with the theme of the transience of
all worldly things are considered elegies
 Some elegies written in the late 16rh and early 17th centuries are love poems,
although they relate to the sense of elegy as lament
 in the 17th century the term began to limited to the formal and sustained
lament in verse for the death of a particular person, usually ending in a
consolation
 A. R. Entwistle observes, “Sometimes death is the inspiration and sole theme: at
other times it merely the common starting point from which the poet have launched
various themes.”
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9.  Elegy:
Pastoral Elegy
 An important subtype of elegy is Pastoral elegy.
 New kind of elegy was introduced into English Poetry during Renaissance
Poet presented himself as shepherd bewailing the loss of a companion
 lamentation for the death of a person (real or fictional) who rather than
being described realistically is imagined within an idealized pastoral
environment
portrays its imagined countryside as a place of prelapsarian innocence, far
removed from the vices of the cities.
Manner of speech and setting from rustic life
 John Milton's’ Lycidas and Matthew Arnold’s Thyrisis
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10.  Elegy:
Major Practitioners and text
 Old English Poems such as the Wonderer and The Seafarer
 The medieval poem Pearl
 Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess
 Lord Alfred Tennyson's’ In Memoriam(1850), The Death of the Arthur Hallam
Thomas Grays’ Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1757)
W H Auden’s In Memory of W b Yeats(1940)
 Walt Whitman’s O Captain! My Captain
 German Poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1912-22)
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11.  Epic
Meaning & Origin
 Epic is a long narrative poem on a serious subject, told in formal and
elevated or grandiose style
 Centered on a heroic figure on whose actions depend the fate of a tribe, a
nation or the human race
 Ranked by Aristotle as second only to tragedy, and by many Renaissance
critics as the highest of all genre
 Epic, the word derived from the Ancient Greek adjective “epikos” means a
poetic story.
 hero usually the representative of value of certain culture, race, nation or a
religious group kapgate.laxmi

12.  Epic:
Conventions of the Epic
usually divided into twelve books in number
The setting of the poem is ample in scale and may be worldwide or even
larger
The narrator begins by a prayer of Muse
 The narrator starts in medias res (in the middle of things)
An epic poem is a ceremonial performance, and is narrated in a ceremonial
style
 Contains number of thrilling episodes
 Employs conventional poetic devises such as Homeric Epithet and Homeric
Simile
 Actions are controlled by supernatural agents. kapgate.laxmi

13.  Epic: Types
Two types of Epics:
1)Traditional Epics/ Folk Epic or Epic of Growth
 They were written version what had originally been oral poems about a
tribal or national hero during a war like age
2) Literary Epic or Epic of Art
 These epics were composed by individual poetic craftsmen in deliberarte
imitation of traditional form
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14.  Epic
Major practitioners and text
 Traditional Epics: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Anglo Saxon Beowulf and
Vergil’s Aeneid
1) Iliad: set against Trojan war, deals mainly with the fighting between
Agamemnon and Achilles in the final year of the battle
2) The Odyssey: Sequel of Iliad, depicts the journey of Odysseus back home to
Ethaca, after the fall of Troy
3) Beowulf: Surviving epic from Old English period, written probably in the
7th century AD
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15.  Epic
Major practitioners and text
Literary Epic: John Milton’s Paradise Lost
 Adam and Eve are the progenitors of the entire human race
• The scope of Paradise Lost is the entire universe, its action is contrived in hell,
executed on earth and punished by heaven
• includes the revolt in heaven by the rebel against God, the journey of Satan
through chaos to discover the newly created world
• Minton’s grand style suits the epic; his formal diction and elaborate and
stylized syntax, which are often modeled on Latin poetry
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16.  Lyric
Meaning & Origin
Any fairly short poem that is subjective in treatment
 In the original Greek, “lyric” signified a song sung to the accomplishment of
a lyre
 Musical and well knit poem, possessing a definite structure
Can be divided into three part:
1) State of emotion (N. Hepple calls it the Motive) first few lines
2) consist of thoughts suggested by the emotion
3) mark the poets return to his initial mood, the mood of reason (last stanza)
These three parts distinctly noted in Herrick’s Lyric To Blossom
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17.  Lyric
Features
 consist of the utterance by a single speaker
 many lyric speaker are represented as musing in solitude
 in dramatic lyric, the speaker is represented as addressing another person in
specific situation
 in a number of lyrics, the speaker is conventional period figure, such as long
suffering suitor in the Petrarchan Sonnet or the courtly, witty lover of the
Cavalier poems
 Within a lyric, the process of observation, thought, memory and feeling may
be organized in a variety of ways
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18.  Lyric
Major practitioners and text
John Donne’s The Canonization
 William Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey
 Shelley’s To Night
 Robert Burns’ O my love like a red red rose
 Shakespeare's Sonnet
 Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress
 Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach
 W B Yeat's Sailing to Byzantium
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19.  Ode
Meaning & Origin
 a long lyric poem
serious in subject and treatment
 elevated in style and elaborate in its stanzaic structure
 often in the form of address
 sometimes used to commemorate an important public occasion
 derived from Greek word “aeidein” which means ‘to chant or sing’
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20.  Ode
Historical Context
The regular or Pindaric ode in English is close imitation of Pindar’s form
 The prototype was established by the Greek poet Pindar, whose odes were
modeled on the songs by the chorus in Greek drama
 Romantic poets perfected the personal ode of description and passionate
meditation
 Horatian Ode was originally modelled on the matter, tone and form of the
odes of the Ronan, Horace
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21.  Ode
Types
 Three types:
1) The Dorian Ode/ Pindaric Ode/ regular Ode
 Its structure was borrowed from the movements of dancers
 Choric and sung to the accomplishment of a dance.
Consisted Three parts:
1) Strophe: during the recitation of which the dancers made a turn from right
to the left
2) Antistrophe: during the recitation of which the dancers made a turn from
left to the right
3) Epode: during the recitation of which the dancers stood still
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22.  Ode
Types
2) The Lesbian Ode/ Horatian Ode
 simpler than Pindaric ode
 consist of number of short stanzas, similar in length and arrangement
 treatment is direct and dignified
 popularized in Latin by two great Roman writers, Horace and Catullus
 Horatian odes are calm, meditative and colloquial
 Written in contrast to the passion, visionary boldness and formal language of
Pindar’s ode kapgate.laxmi

23.  Ode
Types
3) Irregular Ode
Introduced by Abraham Cowley in 1656 as a variation to the Pindaric ode
 Doest not follow the recurrent stanzaic pattern of the Pindaric ode
 Each stanza has its own pattern of variable line lengths, number of lines and
rhyme scheme, in accordance with shift in subject and mood
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24.  Ode
Major practitioners and text
Thomas Grays’s The Progress of poesy
 William Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality
 Shelley’s Ode to the west wind
 John Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast
 John Keats’ To Autumn
 Coleridge’s Dejection : An Ode
 Wallace Stevens’ The Idea of Order at Key West
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25.  Satire
Meaning & Origin
An art of making a subject ridiculous by evoking feeling of amusement,
contempt and scorn.
The subject of the satire may be an individual, type of person, a class, an
institution, a nation or even humanity in whole
 Johnson defined satire as a poem in which wickedness or folly is censured.
 Term derived from the Latin word Satira , a later of Satura meaning ‘medley’
 It may be a cooking term in origin meaning ‘mixed dish’ or as Juvenal called
it ollapodria, ‘mish-mash’ or ‘farrago’
 verse satire may be written as an ode, an elegy, a ballad or anything else.
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26.  Satire: Feature
Aims at diminishing or derogating a subject by making it appear ridiculous
 It creates towards the subject attitude of amusement, contempt, scorn or
indignation
 Different from comedy: Comedy evokes laughter as an end in itself while
satire derides
 Satire uses laughter as weapon, and against a subject that exist outside the
work itself
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27.  Satire: Types
Two types:
1) Formal Satire:
 satiric voice speaks out in the first person and often addresses the reader or
a character in the work called adversarius
 The major function of the adversarius is to explicit and add credibility to
satiric speaker’s comment
Classified into two types
1)Horatian Satire: the speaker is an urbane, witty, and tolerant man of the
world who is amused by the spectacle of human folly and pretentiousness
and hypocrisy. Example: Pope’s Moral Essay
2) Juvenalian Satire: the speaker is a serious moralist who uses a dignified style
to condemn the vices of humanity by evoking the readers contempt, moral
indignation or unillusioned sadness
Example: Johnson’s London and The Vanity of Human Wishes kapgate.laxmi

28.  Satire: Types
Two types:
2) Informal Satire:
 the form of a fictional narrative and the object of satire are charecters that
make themselves ridiculous by their action, thought and words.
 Characters who make long speeches and who make the ideas they defend
ridiculous by their arguments.
 Menippean Satire is a type of Indirect satire modelled on the Cynic
philosopher Menippus
 Examples: Voltaire’s Candide (1759), Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare
Abbey (1818)
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29.  Satire
Major practitioners and text
Thomas Lodge’s A Fig for Momus (1595)
 Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1607
 Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock
 Jonathan Swift's Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
 T S Eliot’ The Waste Land (1922)
 George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945)
 G B Shaw’s Arms And the Man (1898)
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30.  Sonnet
Meaning & Origin
 A lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter
lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme
 Sicily and Provence have been suggested two possible sources
 First met in Italy in the second of the 13th century
 associated with the great Italian poet Petrarch
Originally a short poem
 Derived from Italian word “sonetto” means a little sound
 also known as Italian Sonnet
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31.  Sonnet
1) Petrarchan Sonnet/Italian Sonnet
 falls into two main parts: Octave (Eight lines)- abbaabba , followed by
Sestet (Six lines) – cdecde / cdcdcd
 Rhyming scheme favours a statement of problem, situation or incident in
octave, with a resolution in the sestet
 After eight line, there is well marked pause or Volta (turn in the thought)
 Petrarchan Sonnet was later used for a variety of subject by John Milton,
Wordsworth, Christiana Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti and others
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32.  Sonnet
1) English Sonnet
Introduced into England by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of
Surrey in the 16th century
 Shakespearean Sonnet falls into three quatrains and a concluding couplet:
abab cdcd, efef, gg
 Spenserian Sonnet : linked each quatrain to the next by continuing rhyme:
abab bcbc cdcd ee
 The final couplet in English sonnet usually imposes and epigrammatic turn at
the end. kapgate.laxmi

33.  Sonnet
Major practitioners and text
Spenser’s Amerotti
Philips Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella
Wordsworth’s London and The River Duddon
John Keats, W B Yeats, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, George Meredith
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34. Thank You!