Kinds of Poetry

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Kinds of Poetry As literature, poetry can be put to many uses—from telling long stories to presenting some small insight by the author. The uses of poetry have led to the development of different literary types. Among them are the narrative, dramatic, and lyric. Narrative poetry, like long fiction, tells a story. Best known among narrative works are the Greek epics—the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Bible’s Book of Job is also a narrative. The anonymous Song of Roland is a narrative from the Middle Ages. Later examples of the type are Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Courtship of Miles Standish, and Benét’s John Brown’s Body. Shorter narrative poems include Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin and Robert Frost’sThe Death of the Hired Man. Dramatic poetry is nearly as old as the narrative form. The Greek dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were outstanding tragedians whose works have never been surpassed. Aristophanes was the great writer of comedic drama. In English, Shakespeare is considered the most outstanding of dramatists. Such later poets as John Dryden, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Robert Browning wrote verse plays. In the 20th century Christopher Fry, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden produced verse dramas. Eliot’sMurder in the Cathedral has been staged frequently, and his Cocktail Party also appeared on Broadway. Auden wrote For the Time Being, called a Christmas oratorio. Fry’s most notable play was The Lady’s Not for Burning. Lyric poems are so called because they were originally meant to be set to music accompanied by an instrument called the lyre. Lyric poems, the most common type in English, are shorter than narrative and dramatic works. They express the poet’s thoughts or feelings on a single subject. The sonnet is one of the best forms of lyric poetry, a field in which Shakespeare was an expert. Other
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