Kinds of Poems - Collections of Special Types of Poetry

A collection of ballads, both traditional folk ballads, the often anonymous song-poems sung and resung for centuries before they were written down, and literary ballads, narrative poems written in ballad form.

A collection of classic English and American nursery rhymes—the lullabyes, counting games, riddles and rhymed fables that are children’s earliest experiences of poetry.

Notes on the history of the prose poem, brought into English by the influence of Charles Baudelaire on the early 20th century Modernists, and collection of classic prose poems by Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams.

The sonnet is a fixed poetic form, confined to 14 lines, but it has paradoxically proven to be a most flexible container for all kinds of poetic ideas. Here’s a collection of classic sonnets, arranged chronologically to reveal the evolution of the sonnet form in English.

A collection of poems in which the art is visual, and the typographical arrangement is as much a part of the poem’s meaning as other more traditional poetic techniques—including examples by Rinaldo Rasa, Alan Sondheim, Tree Riesener, and an anonymous Web poet.

When we talk about epics, we’re usually thinking of Homer, or the long narratives of medieval romance, or the Scandinavian sagas, or the Anglo-Saxon adventures of Beowulf... but plenty of modern American poets have written epics as well.