Types Of Poetry

Have I tricked you? I promised you a fun poetry site and suddenly there’s a section called Types of Poetry, which sounds like the sort of boring rubbish that is taught at school. Perhaps I’d better try and explain. I think it’s worth learning a little bit about the different types of poetry, because it makes reading the poems more fun. I’ve deliberately kept the explanations short and light, so that you won’t feel too much as though you're at school, and included as examples lots of funny poems that you won’t find elsewhere on the website. As you become more knowledgeable about different types of poetry, you may be amazed to discover that you:

• Get more enjoyment from reading poetry
  Reading poems just for fun is fine, but once you’ve learned a bit about different types of poetry you’ll understand what the poet was trying to achieve, be able to spot tricks used to make the poems funnier and enjoy reading them all the more.
• Feel inspired to write funny poetry
  This may surprise you, but the main reason for creating this site was not to show off my poems, but to encourage you to write funny poems of your own. Learning about different forms and styles of poetry helps broaden your horizons and encourages you to experiment by writing different types of funny poems.
• Shine in poetry classes at school
  The last thing I want to do is teach you poetry, but you may find that you pick up a few useful pieces of information along the way. Indeed, it is quite likely that you'll end up knowing more about poetry than your teacher. It would be wrong to use this new-found knowledge to embarass your teacher during your English or Literacy classes. It would, however, be quite acceptable to try and encourage your teacher to include more funny poetry in their lessons, especially if all they have been feeding you is a diet of long, boring poems written by poets who died centuries ago.
• Score more goals at football
  A recent study by sports scientists at Botley University found that football players who had a measurable critical appreciation of poetry scored an average of 2.3 more goals per season than other players. More amazingly still, footballers who also wrote poetry scored, on average, an additional 4.2 goals per season, although the latter sample size was not large enough to be statistically significant.

OK, I'll admit that the last one was a lie, but I felt you might just be starting to doze off.

Types, styles and forms of poetry

When we talk about types of poetry, we're really talking about systems for classifying poems according to features of the poem. At a very simple level, poems could be divided according to their length, target audience, emotional intent or when they were written. This site is described as containing short funny poems for kids, which should make it fairly clear what type of poetry you'll find here without the need for a complicated explanation. I sometimes add the term 'original', 'contemporary' or 'modern' to the description, so that readers know I'm not passing off any second-hand rubbish. Within the site, a second form of classification according to subject is used - animal poems, school poems, rude poems etc. - to help make it easier for readers to find suitable poems.

The Types of Poetry section deals with a third and rather more complicated classification system. This system relies on the physical characteristic of poems - the number of lines, rhyme scheme and metre - to describe different forms of poetry and the use of language and specific linguistic devices to describe different styles of poetry. I'm not even sure I completely understand it myself, but we'll try and muddle through together.

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