Poetry

What is poetry? It may be easier to say what it's not. Poetry is not prose. It's not sentences that are grouped together into paragraphs. Also, it's not something you can summarize. Poetry can be a way of capturing feelings or moments. Poetry can be a way to tell a story. Poetry can be a way to change how people think. As with any communication medium, you get to choose how to use it. Poetry is a vast field with thousands of years of history, and these pages have some general information on its elements and structure.

• Structure

• Terminology

• Rhyme

• Rhythm

• Haiku

Poems

Here are some famous poems that might be of interest. These were selected because they're famous and good examples of techniques mentioned on this site. They're also in the Public Domain.

• E. E. Cummings – It May Not Always Be So; And I Say (1923)

• E. E. Cummings – Since Feeling Is First (1926)

• Clare Harner – Immortality (1934)

• Gerard Manley Hopkins – Spring and Fall (1918)

• Langston Hughes – I, Too (1926)

• Alfred Noyes – The Highwayman (1906)

• Edgar Allan Poe – The Bells (1848)

• Edgar Allan Poe – The Raven (1845)

• William Shakespeare – Sonnet 18 (1609)

• Walt Whitman – O Captain! My Captain! (1865)

More Poems

Here are some other poems that might interest high school students.

• Margaret Atwood – A Visit (1995)

• W.H. Auden – Funeral Blues (1936)

• Carol Ann Duffy – Selling Manhattan (1987)

• Joseph Fasano – For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper (2024)

• Guante – How to Explain White Supremacy to a White Supremacist (2016)

• Sharon Olds – I Go Back to May 1937 (2004)

• Mary Oliver – Wild Geese (1986)

References

• Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry. (2011). Center for Media & Social Impact.

• Kearney, D. (n.d.) Sharpened Visions: A Poetry Workshop [MOOC]. Coursera. Retrieved 2024.

• Solzman, E. (2012). What is poetry? The Open University. Retrieved 2024.