Types of Poetry

So maybe you've heard of a sonnet or haiku but there are hundreds of different types of poetry forms you may not have heard about!

Some other types of poems include:

Concrete Poems
Dramatic Monologue (also a theatre term)
Elegy
Epistle
Found Poem
Epigram
Limerick
Pantoum
Viallanelle
Terza Rima
Tanka
Ghazal
Cinquian
Persona Poem
Cento
Acrostic
List Poem

If you are interested in writing poetry, experimenting with these forms can be a fun place to start. Explore Shadow Poetry to learn about a number of different poetry types.

One fun type of poem is a Cento, a cento is a poem made up of lines from other poets, it is a "patchwork poem." To create this type of poem, just write some of your favorite lines from poems on paper and cut them into strips, then rearrange them to make a new poem. Let's give it a try!

Here's a cento I created from some of our examples:

My Love

My love is like a thing with feathers
that perches in the soul.

It sits looking over harbor
and city on silent haunches
and then, as in uffish thought.

sings the tune without the words
that’s newly sprung in June.

Another fun poem to experiment with is a concrete poem. A concrete poem is a type of poem that looks similar to the subject. Here is an example of a concrete poem from shadowpoetry.com

Try creating your own concrete poem or make a concrete poem with this online tool!

To return to the table of contents click HERE or click NEXT to keep reading.