World Poetry Day: celebrating the bards sublime

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” When we stumble upon these words immortalized by the nineteenth century Romantic maestro, John Keats, it is sensed deeply how poetry has a humbling effect on the human soul. It is believed that dance is an expression of music by the body. Poetry, similarly, can also be reckoned to be the deepest and purest expression of the soul and poets are storytellers of the heart.

From the epic form to the mock epic, sonnet to haiku, elegy to pastoral, poetry has witnessed numerous metamorphosis, meandering through changing times and mindset. On World Poetry Day, we bring to you the 10 best practitioners of 10 most popular forms of poetry.
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In this form, the speaker not the poet, addresses a passive listener, not the reader, and speaks the lines of the poem in a dialogic pattern, which reveals the speaker’s temperament, his character, and the real backstory to the setting he creates himself. Browning’s “My Last Duchess” is one such example where a cunning duke unintentionally reveals the story to a listener that he had murdered his ex-wife.

Originally Japanese, Haikus are essentially very short poems, sometimes expressing transcendental ideas. Sir George Sansom called the Haiku, "little drops of poetic essence." Imagist poet Ezra Pound, was greatly influenced by the Haiku tradition and wrote his famous haiku-like poem, “In a Station of the Metro”.
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Occasional poems are written to celebrate or eulogise a specific occasion. They can celebrate weddings, birth anniversaries, crowning, and can mourn death as well. Dryden’s “Annus Mirabilis” commemorates the return of a king from exile.
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Originally a love poem, the sonnet came to England after Wyatt and Surrey translated some of Petrarch’s sonnets in English. It is a poem of 14 lines using free verse and an intricate rhyming scheme. Over the years, sonnets dealt with a variation of themes. There are several sonnet cycles, namely, Petrarchan, Shakespearean, etc. Shakespeare dedicated most of his sonnets to his Dark Lady and the Earl of Pembroke, William Herbert.
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Elegy, championed by Auden, Tennyson, Thomas Gray, is a formal lament on the death of a particular person. Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” was written on the death of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam.
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An ode is a long lyric poem with a serious subject usually written in an elevated style. Keat’s “Ode to Autumn”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, and “Ode to the Nightingale” are some of fantastic examples of odes which sing of grave issues in beautiful lyrical modes.
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A ballad is typically a song, which tells a story. Ballads were old genres created originally to be transmitted orally. They were later modified and popularized during the Romantic movement, especially in works of Coleridge and Sir Walter Scott. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Coleridge is one the best representatives of the English ballad tradition.
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A pastoral poem, as the name suggests, deals with rural life and celebrates the life of shepherds. It typically draws contrast between innocence and simplicity of rural life with the grandiosity and lustre of court life. Spenser’s "The Shepherd’s Calendar" is a major example of this genre.
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The mock-epic uses the elevated epic conventions but illustrate a trivial tale. Pope’s "Rape of the Lock" tells the story of a young woman and her suitor in a grand fight because the suitor cut off her lock of her hair!
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Epics operate on a large scale, both on length and topic, and tell a grand story with elevated language and style. Milton’s Paradise Lost, divided into 12 books, is the classic tale of Adam and Eve, banished from Eden after they disobeyed God on Lucifer’s orders.
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