Pretty words.
No, really. That's what poetry is. Sometimes it rhymes, sometimes there are more line breaks than usual. All you really need to make a poem, though, is to put it together so it sounds good, or at least sounds the way you want it to sound. It is the favored form of revolutionaries and queens, professors and angsty teens.
Poetry is one of the oldest forms of literature, and many of the earliest tales from civilizations across the world are in some sort of poetic form.
Often overlaps with Theatre and Music. For tropes associated with poetry, see Poetry Tropes. See also Poetry Forms.
Examples:
- The Achilleid
- The Aeneid
- archy and mehitabel
- Anna Snegina
- Ariel (Plath)
- The Author's Ordeal
- Autobiography of Red
- The Ballad of Mulan
- Batrachomyomachia
- The Battle of Maldon
- Beowulf
- The Bride of Corinth
- The Canterbury Tales
- Casabianca
- Casey at the Bat
- Catulli Carmen 16
- A Certain Crazy Christmas Special
- Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
- Child Ballads
- Collected Poems (1930) (Robert Frost)
- The Courtship of Miles Standish
- Creation Man And The Messiah
- Darkness
- The Divine Comedy
- Don Juan
- Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
- Dream of the Rood
- Enoch Arden
- The Epic of Gilgamesh
- The Erl-King or Der Erlkönig
- The Eve of St. Agnes
- The Faerie Queene
- The Figurehead
- Florante at Laura
- Flower Fairies
- The Foundation of S.F. Success
- A Further Range
- The Georgics
- Goblin Market
- Green Eggs and Ham
- The Hangman
- The Highwayman
- Howl 1955
- The Hunting of the Snark
- Idylls of the King
- I Just Make Them Up, See!
- The Iliad
- Jabberwocky
- The Kalevala
- Kalevipoeg
- Kubla Khan
- Krákumál
- Keep It In The Family
- Lady Clare
- Leaves of Grass
- Lenore
- The Loreley
- Manfred (sort of a poem, sort of a play, sort of a short story)
- Max and Moritz
- The Metamorphoses
- The Nautical Ballad of Ben Bo Bohns
- New Hampshire
- Nibelungenlied
- The Odyssey
- Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
- Orlando Furioso
- Orlando Innamorato
- The Owl and the Nightingale
- Paradise Lost
- Parzival
- The Peony Pavilion
- The Phantom Ship (1927)
- Pippa Passes
- Poetic Edda
- Poisoned Apples: Poems for You, My Pretty
- The Puddle Pronker
, from The Weedverse
- Punica
- Rainbow Bridge
- The Rape of the Lock
- The Raven
- Rejection Slips
- Reynard the Fox
- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
- Ruslan and Ludmila
- The Second Coming
- The Shahnameh
- Songs of Innocence and of Experience
- The Song of Roland
- The Sonneteer
- Sonnets from the Portuguese
- The Spider and the Fly
- Spoon River Anthology
- The Tales of Ensign Stål
- The Thebaid
- The Trojan Cycle
- 'Twas the Night Before Christmas
- The Twelve by Alexandre Blok
- The Wild Party
- The Waste Land
- Who Pays the Piper?
- The Wreck of the Hesperus
- Zorgamazoo
- Anna Akhmatova
- Maya Angelou
- Isaac Asimov
- W. H. Auden
- Graeme Base
- Charles Baudelaire
- The Beat Generation
- William Blake
- Roberto Bolaño
- Bertolt Brecht
- Joseph Brodsky
- Robert Browning
- Charles Bukowski
- Robert Burns
- Lord Byron
- Lewis Carroll
- Catullus
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- G. K. Chesterton
- Jean Cocteau
- Leonard Cohen
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- E. E. Cummings
- Emily Dickinson
- John Donne
- Takashi Yanase
- T. S. Eliot
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Eve Ewing
- Robert Frost
- Federico García Lorca
- Louise Glück
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Thomas Hardy
- Hermann Hesse
- Homer
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
- Horace
- A. E. Housman
- Langston Hughes
- Ted Hughes
- Victor Hugo
- John Keats
- Rudyard Kipling
- Philip Larkin
- Tom Lehrer
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Audre Lorde
- Christopher Marlowe
- Andrew Marvell
- John Milton
- Gabriela Mistral
- Ogden Nash
- Pablo Neruda
- Ovid
- Dorothy Parker
- Pat Parker
- Banjo Paterson
- Sylvia Plath
- Edgar Allan Poe
- Alexander Pope
- Alexander Pushkin
- Rainer Maria Rilke
- Arthur Rimbaud
- Christina Rossetti
- Carl Sandburg
- Sappho
- Siegfried Sassoon
- Gil Scott-Heron
- Dr. Seuss
- Anne Sexton
- William Shakespeare
- Ntozake Shange
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Shel Silverstein
- Patti Smith
- Snorri Sturluson
- Rabindranath Tagore
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- Dylan Thomas
- Virgil
- Alice Walker
- María Elena Walsh
- Henrik Wergeland
- Walt Whitman
- William Carlos Williams
- William Wordsworth
- William Butler Yeats