Introduction to Poetry

How often have you had the words to a popular song stuck in your head?

This is one form of poetry called Lyric Poetry.

Aristotle (384 – 322 B.C.E.) divided poetry into three categories: lyric, dramatic and epic.

Lyric poetry is the most read form of poetry in our occidental world and has been since the Romantic Period of 19^th century Europe. See John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and P. B. Shelley.

Wikipedia calls Lyric Poetry “a formal type of poetry which expresses personal emotions or feelings, typically spoken in the first person.”

As a reader some things to consider when reading a poem are what is the poet trying to express?

Does the subject reveal something new?

What insight or questions arise from reading the poem?

Is there structure and knowledge of language demonstrated by the poet?

How is the poem organized? e.g. Is there meter, rhythm, rhyme, free verse and sense/nonsense?

Does the poet include elements such as: alliteration, consonance or onomatopoeia?

When you read a poem, do you see, smell, feel, hear, touch and remember?

Overall, when you read a poem, what does it do to you? Do you laugh, think, feel agitated, remember or dream?

These questions make a poem unique to each person who reads it.

What is the poem you most admire? Why?