EXPLORING

FORM
AND

CONTENT
IN LITERATURE
Forms

PROSE

POETRY
PROSE
Non-fiction
Prose that is a true story or factual account of
events or information is nonfiction. For
example, Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl
composed entirety of journal excerpts,
recounts the young teen’s experience of hiding
with her family in Nazi-occupied Netherlands
during World War II.

Fiction
A literary work of fiction. This is the most
popular type of literary prose, used in novels
and short stories, and generally has characters,
plot, setting, and dialogue. For Example, Harry
Potter series is a fictional piece of prose work.

DRAMA
A drama is a type of prose that is written for
the purpose of being performed in front of an
audience. This type of writing is written in the
form of a script, and the story is told through
the lines of the characters played by actors.
WHAT’S YOUR
GENRE?
POETRY
BALLAD
A short narrative poem with stanzas of four lines
called quatrains and possibly a refrain that most
frequently deals with folklore or popular legends and
is suitable for singing.
An example of a ballad would be Coleridge’s “The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
`By thy long beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me ?
BLANK VERSE
Blank verse is poetry that has no set stanzas or line
length. It is a common form of poetry seen often in
Shakespeare, Milton, Yeats, Auden, Stevens, and
Frost. In fact, a great deal of the greatest literature in
English has been written in blank verse. Blank verse is
unrhymed lines that follow a strict rhythm, usually
iambic pentameter. An example of unrhymed Blank
Verse is John Milton’s Paradise Lost:
Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With the loss of Eden, till one greater
Man Restore us and regain the blissful seat…
DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE
A poem in which an imagined speaker addresses a
silent listener, usually not the reader. Examples
include Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” T.S.
Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and
Ai’s “Killing Floor.”
ELEGY
A poem of lament and praise and consolation, usually
formal and about the death of a particular person.
Elegies can also mourn the passing of events or
passions. They can be meditative and distressed, such
as “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by
Thomas Gray (arguably the most famous poem to
take this form).
EPIC
An epic poem is a kind of poetry very closely related
to ballads – so closely, in fact, that we might say epic
poems are a kind of ballad. These poems are very
long and tell mythical, heroic, or religious stories.
Epic poetry is found in all the literatures of the
ancient world, from the Greek poet Homer’s Illiad to
the Indian Mahabharata. There are two main
differences between epic poetry and ballads. The first
is length: epic poems are extremely long (the
Mahabharata, for example, has over 200,000 lines)!
There’s no clear cut-off point between a ballad and
an epic poem in terms of length, but in general epic
poems are longer. The second difference is themes: a
ballad can be about any sort of story, whereas an epic
poem must deal with heroic or mythical themes.
EPISTLE
Poems written in the form of a letter are called
epistles. Epistle can adhere to form or can be free
of meter and rhyme. The only requirement is that it is
in letter form. One of the better known epistles is
Alexander Pope’s “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.”
LYRIC
A lyric poem or lyrical poem in literature is a poem in
which the poet either expresses his feelings and
emotions. The poet also presents a character in the first
person to express his emotions. It is a combination of
lyrics and poetry where a piece of poetry is written as a
lyric. Lyric has been derived from the lyre, a musical
stringed instrument used during the Grecian period to
accompany the poetry sung during different festivities.
The Pains of Sleep” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“ERE on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,
In humble trust mine eye-lids close,
With reverential resignation,
No wish conceived, no thought exprest,
Only a sense of supplication.”
These are the first few lines of the famous lyric poem of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This poem, as the title suggests,
is about the pains that the poet has to go through when
sleeping. He explains how he loves to go to sleep as his
eyes become quite humble before sleeping. These first
lines have a perfect metrical pattern and rhyme scheme
to make it an excellent lyric poem.

ODE
Often written in praise of a person, an object, or an
event, odes tend to be longer in form and, generally,
serious in nature. The patterns of the stanzas within
an ode follow noprescribed pattern. A well known
example of an ode would be “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by
John Keats.
PROSE POEM
In the first issue of The Prose Poem: An International Journal,
editor Peter Johnson explained, "Just as black humor straddles
the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem
plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting
precariously on banana peels." While it lacks the line breaks
associated with poetry, the prose poem maintains a poetic
quality, often utilizing techniques common to poetry, such as
fragmentation, heightened imagery, emotional effects,
compression, repetition, and rhyme. A fine example of the
form is Baudelaire's "Be Drunk," which concludes:
“It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of
time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or
on virtue as you wish.”
Sonnet
Sonnet are fourteen lines long and are renowned for focusing
on love. Often, the first eight lines of the poem (the first two
quatrains in an English sonnet) demonstrate the problem to be
solved, and the final six lines (the last quatrain and a couplet
in the English sonnet) resolve it. Sonnets are written in iambic
pentameter.
The English sonnet adheres to this rhyme pattern: ABAB CDCD
EFEF GG, or a variation on it. The Italian sonnet usually
follows this pattern: ABBA ABBA CDE CDE. Sometimes the
tercets (groups of three lines) vary. These variations can look
like: CDC DCD or CDC DDC or CDC EDC. Finally, there is a
second form of English sonnet known as the Spenserian
sonnet. It rhymes ABAB BCBC CDCD EE. It follows the same
basic pattern as the Shakespearean sonnet but varies the
rhyme. Shakespeare’s sonnet 18 is one of the most recognized
examples of this form:
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
LET’S READ A PROSE TOGETHER

Robert DiYanni begins his impressively wide-

ranging study Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry,
Drama, and the Essay (1997) with the following
assertion about why we read:

We read stories for pleasure; they

entertain us. And we read them for
profit; they enlighten us. Stories
draw us into their imaginative
worlds and engage us with the
power of their invention. They
provide us with more than the
immediate interest of narrative – of
something happening – and more
than the pleasures of imagination:
they enlarge our understanding of
ourselves and deepen our
appreciation of life.
(p. 27)
WAITING FOR GODOT
LET’S PRACTICE TOGETHER
READ THRICE
LET’S READ A POEM
TOGETHER
LET’S PRACTICE TOGETHER
LET’S PRACTICE TOGETHER
UNDERSTANDING A POEM

• What subject does the poem

address?

• Who is the speaker of the poem?

• What is the poem’s larger context?

• Which rhetorical devices are used

in the poem?