Poetry

""Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.""

- Allen Ginsberg

Pretty words.

No, really. That's what poetry is. Sometimes it rhymes, sometimes there are more line breaks than usual. All you really need to make a poem, though, is to put it together so it sounds good, or at least sounds the way you want it to sound. It is the favored form of revolutionaries and queens, pretentious professors and angsty teens.

Poetry is one of the oldest kinds of literature, and many of the earliest tales from civilizations across the world are in some sort of poetic form.

Tropes relating to poetry
 * Common Meter
 * Epic Catalog
 * Epigraph
 * Lost in Translation
 * Midword Rhyme
 * The Muse
 * Narrative Poem
 * Nursery Rhyme
 * Nu Speling
 * Painful Rhyme
 * Poem Fic
 * Rhymes on a Dime
 * Rhyming with Itself
 * Second Person Narration
 * Subverted Rhyme Every Occasion

Notable Poetic Works
 * The Aeneid
 * Archy and Mehitabel
 * Ariel
 * Batrachomyomachia
 * The Battle of Maldon
 * Beowulf
 * The Canterbury Tales
 * "Casey at the Bat"
 * The Divine Comedy
 * Lord Byrons Don Juan
 * Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
 * Dream of the Rood
 * The Epic of Gilgamesh
 * "The Erl King" or "Der Erlkönig"
 * The Faerie Queene
 * Goblin Market
 * Green Eggs and Ham
 * Howl
 * The Hunting of the Snark
 * Idylls of the King
 * The Iliad
 * Jabberwocky
 * The Kalevala
 * Leaves of Grass
 * Manfred (sort of a poem, sort of a play, sort of a short story)
 * The Metamorphoses
 * Nibelungenlied
 * The Odyssey
 * Old Possums Book of Practical Cats
 * Orlando Furioso
 * Paradise Lost
 * The Peony Pavilion
 * The Rape Of The Lock
 * The Raven
 * The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
 * Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue
 * The Second Coming
 * The Shahnameh
 * Songs of Innocence and of Experience
 * The Song of Roland
 * The Sonneteer
 * Sonnets from the Portugese
 * The Tales of Ensign Stal
 * The Three Decker
 * The Trojan Cycle
 * The Wild Party
 * The Waste Land
 * Zorgamazoo

Notable Poets
 * WH Auden
 * The Beat Generation
 * Richard Brautigan
 * Allen Ginsberg
 * William Blake
 * Roberto Bolano
 * Bertolt Brecht
 * Charles Bukowski
 * Robert Burns
 * Lord Byron
 * Lewis Carroll
 * Geoffrey Chaucer
 * Leonard Cohen
 * Emily Dickinson
 * TS Eliot
 * Robert Frost
 * Federico Garcia Lorca
 * Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 * Homer
 * Ted Hughes
 * John Keats
 * Edna St Vincent Millay
 * John Milton
 * Gabriela Mistral
 * Pablo Neruda
 * Ovid
 * Ogden Nash
 * Banjo Paterson
 * Sylvia Plath
 * Edgar Allan Poe
 * Alexander Pope
 * Ezra Pound
 * Alexander Pushkin
 * Rainer Maria Rilke
 * Sappho
 * Siegfried Sassoon
 * Anne Sexton
 * Dr. Seuss
 * William Shakespeare
 * Percy Bysshe Shelley
 * Shel Silverstein
 * Patti Smith
 * Virgil
 * Walt Whitman
 * William Butler Yeats
 * John Donne
 * Catullus

Useful Notes
 * Poetry Forms
 * Sonnet

Poetry Games
 * Exquisite Corpse