POETRY
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About Poetry |
Let me just interject an opinion about poetry. Nowadays it seems the style is free verse, that is, pretty much devoid of structure. Some folks turn up their nose at sonnets or other poetic frameworks, dismissing poetry if it rhymes. Look, some free verse is good, and many structured poems are tripe, but breaking a paragraph into three-word lines isn't going to make you a better poet, and I can just about guarantee that a technically perfect sonnet is going to be more mentally challenging, and probably more interesting, than what gets published in most college lit mags these days. Inspiration and a good sense of rhythm and word choice are essential to writing good poetry; but knowing your metrics and various forms will allow you to craft poems that get noticed and remembered. |
For Poets--and Readers of Poetry: "An introduction to the elements of poetry and to the techniques of poetic interpretation, for those who love to read and write poetry, but who sometimes find it intimidating or hard to understand." |
| Arnaut & Karkur's ultimate on-line prosody resource |
Poetics -- a study guide for students at St. Edwards University. Also, a page on Poetic Terminology. |
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About.com's poetry link site. |
| Poet's Corner: various poetry links. |
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A list of on-line rhyming dictionaries. Because a poem should be more than prose in non-standard formats. |
| RhymeZone: Rhymes, synonyms, antonyms, spelling, etc. |
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Want all the structure with none of the rhyme? Look at this website about Alliterative and Accentual Poetry. Also, Readings of old English Poetry, Building Blocks of Old English Poetry and Anglo-Saxon Accentual Meter. And a Lexicon of Kennings. |
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Old English Poetry and Literature: A nicely-done encyclopedic background overview of the subject. |
| Complete corpus of Anglo Saxon Poetry |
| A Poet's Guide to Alliterative Verse |
| Dana Gioia discusses alliterative verse in Saxon and modern poetry. |
| A modern retelling of the Alamo in the Nordic style: Bowie Gizzardsbane. |
| Meter and Poetic Style in Saxon poetry, from Baker's Introduction to Old English. |
| A page dealing with British poetic styles from the Early Middle Ages. Mostly focuses on Anglo Saxon poetry right now. |
| About the Spectrist school of poetry. |
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Poems |
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Representative Poetry OnLine featured many poets of varying renown. |
| The Poem Hunter site contains nearly 50,000 poems. |
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From Homer to Auden, here are a score of poets. |
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War Poems and Songs reflect hope, zeal and tragedy -- and leave us with more tragedy than anything else. |
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Let's not forget E. A. Poe. |
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Poets' Corner "Our goal is to create the largest, most diverse, and most user-friendly public library of poetic works ever assembled." |
| The Wondering Minstrels: an anthology of English poetry, with a new poem (and commentary) daily. |
| Favorite Poem Project |
| Cowboy Poetry, and an ode to Equus caballus and Reincarnation. |
| Wikipedia entries for A.E.Houseman, Rudyard Kipling, Sigfried Sassoon, Joyce Kilmer, William Wordsworth, |