Please don’t judge me too harshly for this: I haven’t really read much poetry since high school English, but recently I’ve been remembering how much I loved poems like “Charge of the Light Brigade,” “The Raven,” “Still I Rise,” and “Dulce et Decorum est.”
For me, the musicality that comes from meter and rhyme (and the choice to continue or break a pattern) lends an extra emotional “oomph” to the whole experience – free verse, no matter how beautiful or clever, just doesn’t hit the same. (At least when I’m reading it – listening to slam poetry is wildly different!)
I’d love to find more poems like this, but I don’t know where to start! Collections with works by multiple poets would be great, so that I can explore broadly and then later dive deeper into authors I enjoy. And even though it feels like modern poetry has trended almost exclusively towards free verse, I would love to discovery contemporary poets who write structured work. Suggestions?
by Dark_Unicorn6055
2 Comments
The Norton Anthology of Poetry will probably be a comfortable place to start! There will also be blank verse, but there will be a good collection of metred stuff.
I’m a big fan of Swinburne. He’s definitely trashy, but his rhyme and meter are wonderful.
EE Cummings has some great structured poems, including “anyone lived in a pretty how town”