scaldic or Skaldic poetry: see Old Norse literature.

poetry. For lyric poetry, see ballad; elegy; hymn; lyric; ode; pastoral; sonnet. For narrative poetry, see chansons de geste; epic; idyl; romance. Dramatic poetry is incidentally treated in the articles drama, Western; and tragedy. See also articles on individual poets and on various national literatures. For technical discussions of poetry, see free verse; pentameter; rhyme; versification.

Oral court poetry originating in Norway but developed chiefly by Icelandic poets (skalds) from the 9th to the 13th century. Skaldic poetry was contemporary with Eddic poetry (see Edda) but differed from it in metre, diction, and style. Eddic poetry is anonymous, simple, and terse, often taking the form of an objective dramatic dialogue. Skalds were identified by name. Their poems were descriptive, occasional, and subjective, their metres strictly syllabic instead of free and variable, and their language ornamented with similes and metaphors. Formal subjects were the mythical stories engraved on shields, praise of kings, epitaphs, and genealogies.

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Writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through its meaning, sound, and rhythm. It may be distinguished from prose by its compression, frequent use of conventions of metre and rhyme, use of the line as a formal unit, heightened vocabulary, and freedom of syntax. Its emotional content is expressed through a variety of techniques, from direct description to symbolism, including the use of metaphor and simile. Seealso prose poem; prosody.

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Verse or poem that can, or supposedly can, be sung to musical accompaniment (in ancient times, usually a lyre) or that expresses intense personal emotion in a manner suggestive of a song. Lyric poetry expresses the thoughts and feelings of the poet and is sometimes contrasted with narrative poetry and verse drama, which relate events in the form of a story. The elegy, ode, and sonnet are important forms of lyric poetry.

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or ghazal or gazel

In Islamic literature, a lyric poem, generally short and graceful in form and typically dealing with love. The genre developed in late 7th-century Arabia. Ghazels begin with a rhymed couplet whose rhyme is repeated in all subsequent even lines, while the odd lines are unrhymed. The two main types of ghazel are native to the Hejaz (what is now western Saudi Arabia) and Iraq. It reached its greatest refinement in the works of Hafez. American poets such as Adrienne Rich have used variations of the form.

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Meditative lyric poem. The classical elegy was any poem written in elegiac metre (alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and pentameter). Today the term may refer to this metre rather than to content, but in English literature since the 16th century it has meant a lament in any metre. A distinct variety with a formal pattern is the pastoral elegy, such as John Milton's “Lycidas” (1638). Poets of the 18th-century Graveyard School reflected on death and immortality in elegies, most famously Thomas Gray's “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751).

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