Teen poetry can be organized by theme, style, or genre. Common themes include love, loneliness, and humor. Poetry 180 is a program created by Billy Collins that compiles 180 accessible poems for teenagers. Rhyming verse, blank verse, and free verse are the three major style divisions. Love poetry is the most common theme, while lyric poetry is the most popular genre.
Teen poetry can be organized by theme, style, or genre. Common themes include romantic love, friendship, loneliness, inspiration and humor. Free verse, blank verse, and many types of rhyming lines make up the three major style divisions of poetry.
Billy Collins created a high school program called Poetry 180 while he was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. This anthology compiles 180 easily accessible poems meant to be savored, not analyzed. Poetry 180 is a great place to start because, after reading the anthology, teenagers can look for other works by the authors they liked the most.
Of all the styles of poetry available, rhyming verse is the most relatable form. Rhyming verse follows a specific rhythm, or meter, as well as a prescribed rhyme pattern. There are many forms of rhyming verse, each with its own meter and rhyme scheme, including sonnets, limericks, and villanelles.
Blank verse is poetry that follows a specific meter but does not rhyme. Most of William Shakespeare’s works are written in blank verse. Christopher Marlowe, John Milton and Alfred, Lord Tennyson are also well known for this type of poetry.
Free verse is a style of poetry that focuses on sound without following a strict pattern of meter or rhyme. The best known free verse poet is Walt Whitman. Many teenagers find this style easier to accept, as it resembles normal speech more closely than other styles of poetry.
Categorizing poetry by theme is much more fluid than categorizing by style. Most teen poetry can be classified as love poetry, including romance, longing, unrequited love, and forbidden love. Examples include the balcony scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from Portuguese.
Loneliness, sadness, and despair are other familiar themes in teen poetry. Some favorite poets of these themes are Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and TS Eliot. Although some poems with these themes have rhyme and meter, many free verse poems use short, disjointed lines to emphasize the speaker’s solitude.
Teenage poetry can also be divided into various genres, including epic, lyric, narrative, and dramatic. The most popular genre of poetry for teenagers is lyric poetry. Instead of telling a story or commenting on a situation, lyric poetry seeks to encapsulate a feeling through its words, sound and rhythm. Lyric poems are also typically shorter than those of any other genre.
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