Poetry Background
Dictionary of Poetic Terms

Overview of Forms and Types

Dramatic Poetry

Robert Browning "My Last Duchess"

Maya Angelou "Still I Rise"

Sylvia Plath "Daddy"

Langston Hughes "Let America Be America Again"

Lyric

1.Ode

John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"
Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind"

2. Meditation

George Herbert, "Vertue"
Robert Frost, "Nothing Gold Can Stay"
Omar Khayyam "The Rubaiyat" (Edward J. Fitzgerald, translator)
Anonymous, "Westron Wind"

3. Elegy

Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard"
Wilfred Owen,"Anthem for Doomed Youth"

4. Pastoral

Christopher Marlowe,
"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"
Sir Walter Ralegh
"The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd"

Epic or Narrative

Critical Edition of Beowulf online