Poetry is not simply rhyming but is elevated to the rank of magnificent art. Poetry has existed for many millennia; the first poems were songs and were transmitted orally, which is why many of them are not known today. It is essential to mention that the oldest poetry known to humanity appeared in the XIII century BC (Brooks, 2018). Its author is an Akkadian princess and priestess, En-Hedu-Ana, who wrote about the Gods. Currently, there are different types of poetry, fascinating readers with the plot and the manner of writing (Brooks, 2018). Thus, it is crucial to identify the various types of poetry and provide basic information about them.
It should be mentioned that there are many types of lyrics, but the primary classification is the division into seven kinds. Thus, the first type is haiku poems, which are brief poems without rhyme and use feelings to express emotions and images. However, a feature of this kind is the use of three-line stanzas with a number of compositions of 5/7/5 (Brooks, 2018). Natural elements, beauty, and harmony often inspire haiku or strong emotions experienced. The genre of haiku poetry was created in Japan and later began to be used by poets worldwide. The next type is free verse poems, built on a relatively uniform syntactic organization of lines, on the rhythm of syntagms, that is, the content parts of the sentence. The lines of free verse have different lengths, are not separated into stops, have different numbers of stresses, and their arrangement is arbitrary (Brooks, 2018). Consequently, this kind of verse does not recognize rhymes, as a result of which the separation into stanzas disappears.
However, it is also necessary to distinguish the third type is the syncway, a poem of five unrhymed lines, which emerged in the United States under the influence of Japanese poets (Brooks, 2018). Each of the five terms of the syncway is written according to special rules and has its own composition. Thus, the first line is one word, which contains the main idea and theme of the text. The second line is two words, with the aid of which the central idea or theme of the text is expressed (Brooks, 2018). There are also three words in the third line that describe and express the actions of the writers, and the fourth line expresses the author’s position. After that, the fifth line has one word similar to the first line. The next type is epic poetry, which is a literary genre consisting of a long, serious and poetic account of a significant event that occurred in the past (Brooks, 2018). Meanwhile, the primary source for such poetry is folk narratives with idealized images and generalizations.
Furthermore, as a type of poetry, the ballad is a small lyrical-epic work of folkloric origin on a legendary or historical theme. As a rule, it describes extraordinary, exceptional, heroic events, and the reality is often combined with the fantastic. The following kind is an acrostic, a phrase formed from the first letters of the lines of a verse (Brooks, 2018). Finally, the last type is the sonnet, a lyric poem consisting of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter or hexameter with cross-rhyming. Correspondingly, the sonnet always has two open or closed quatrains with cross-rhyming at the beginning, which are used to indicate the theme of the work (Brooks, 2018). It also has two tercets or three verses that constitute the conclusion of the sonnet.
Therefore, poetry as a genre of literature is one of the oldest art forms in the world. The purpose of poetry is to express an expression loudly, convey a mood, and leave the vivid moments of life in the memory. Poetry includes sonnets, free verse poems, ballads, acrostics, syncopations, epic poetry, and haiku poems. All of these types are designed to delineate the poems’ themes through variant writing techniques.
Reference
Brooks, C. (2018). Modern poetry and the tradition. UNC Press Books.