Forms of poetry and the making of a poem

Forms: an elegy mourns someone (Tennyson, Milton, Whitman's 'O Captain'); an idyll idealises the countryside; a sonnet is a fourteen-line lyric; a ballad tells a story with a refrain; a dramatic monologue speaks to a listener; an epic tells of heroes (Mahabharata, Ramayana).

Haiku (Japan): three unrhymed lines with a sharp image; ghazal (Urdu and Persian): five to fifteen couplets on love and separation (Ghalib); Hindi has doha and pada; a limerick is a funny five-line verse (Edward Lear).

Visual poetry: e.e. cummings's 'A Leaf Falls' places letters so that 'loneliness' and a falling leaf are seen. Free verse is now common, as in Kamala Das's 'My Mother at Sixty-six', one long sentence of thought.

Poems are revised many times: Whitman's 1855 drafts of 'Song of Myself' show lines slashed and 'ghastly man' replaced by 'despairer'. Auden starts with a theme and a problem of form; Esther Morgan says poems do not land word-perfect.

Wordsworth's 'recollected in tranquility' is often forgotten; Gulzar shows routine chasing the poem away; Ayyappa Panniker: every good poem makes a new departure; Czeslaw Milosz fuses the personal and the historical. A good poem joins sincerity, emotion, imagination and command of words.