Learn to Express Yourself In a More Meaningful Way: A Long-Awaited Guide

Let’s say you like something or someone and you want to tell the world, “Hey, you’re great,” or “I admire that,” or “That thing looked so cool!” but you want to express it some way that is more meaningful than those plain words. This is your complete usable guide that also provides excellent examples.

Let’s say you like something or someone and you want to tell the world, “Hey, you’re great,” or “I admire that,” or “That thing looked so cool!” but you want to express it some way that is more meaningful than those plain words. If that is the case, then poetry may hold the key. With very little materials needed, you can create a small artistic monument to whatever it is that so has moved you. It may be brilliant or it may be terrible, but undeniably it is special and captures something between you and it.

Today, poetry is everywhere. It is in the songs on the radio, in our national anthems, and in the fight songs of our favorite sports teams; it pervades our literature, our history, and our culture. But, despite poetry’s abundance, poetry that is both new and good is hard to find now, more than ever. Good, new poetry cherishes and builds on the perennial forms, like meter and rhyme, left to us by 1,400 years of English poets, who have also built on thousands of years of Greek and Chinese poetry. Such good, new poetry carries a message infused with the profound insights and lofty character of the poet. It touches on humanity’s quintessential quest for virtue over vice, epic over ephemeral, and beauty over baseness.

How to Write Classical Poetry features a guide to common poetry forms, brief essays on the relevance of poetry today to the general (non-poet) public, and analysis of great classical poems of the past. This publication is perfect for writers, readers, students, teachers, new poets, and seasoned bards looking for inspiration. It includes easily approachable, relevant, and enchanting (with rhyme and meter) poetry and analysis; a comprehensive guide to poetry forms, including the sonnet, haiku, villanelle, limerick, and more; AP English questions for high school teachers; an in-depth look at how classical poetry works; ten of the greatest poems ever written, including Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18," Donne's "Death Be Not Proud," and Wordsworth's "Daffodils"; a guide to writing a poem like Poe's "Raven"; and much more. Whether you are someone who has never written a word of poetry or are an old hand at versification, this is an indispensable volume.