From the Book - Revised and updated edition.
Introducing Professor Driscoll
Part one: the rhymes and their reasons
Poems of cradles and bough-breakings, too, moon-jumping cows and ten kids in a shoe: nursery rhymes
Rhymes that prompt laughter (if that's what you're after): nonsense verse
Nineteen lines but just two rhymes: the villanelle
There once was a poem so outrageous, read aloud, it became quite contagious: the limerick
Haikus have three lines and seventeen syllables simple, beautiful: the haiku
Gather round for a story of heroes and glory: narrative verse
My dear, aren't you smitten by these words that I've written?: lyric verse
A poem fantastic (though usually old) that may teach a lesson (so it's often retold): the ballad
Sheep, shepherds, and other sappy stuff: the pastoral
Poems of feelings and hearts shining bright (they're a pleasure to hear, but a devil to write): the sonnet
When you haven't got time to think of a rhyme: free verse
Alphabet poems, riddles, epitaphs, and other unusual styles: poems peculiar
Part two: poetry's great - rulers of rhyme, legends of the lyric, and superstars of the spoken word
The first poet: Homer (c.700-800 BC)
The Bard: William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
The free spirit: John Milton (1608 -1674)
The artist: William Blake (1757-1827)
The people's poet: William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Daughter, wife, poet: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
A poet of "Fantastic Terrors"" Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
A rebel without applause: Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Voice of America: Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
A poet of heaven and earth: Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
Poems of everyday beauty: Robert Frost (1874-1963)
The adventurer: Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
An Englishman in Bombay: Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
A good poet for bad children: Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953)
American spirit: Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
The thinker: W.H. Auden (1907-1973)
A brave new voice: Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
The beat of teh city: Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919- )
Irish eye: Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)
Visions of Mexico: Octavio Paz (1914-1998)
Caged bird's song: Maya Angelou (1928-2014).
