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Both poetry and drama are considered literary genres. Poetry is written form that expresses emotions, observations and feelings through rhythmic cadence. It is this combination of cadence and words that draws the reader or listener in. Drama, by contrast, presents the actions and words of characters on the stage.

Dramatic poetry is written to be spoken or acted in public, in front of an audience. It often reveals the inner psychology of a character and must be told from the point of view of a particular person. It reveals the character for the audience by describing their personality and motivations.

Within this genre, there are different types of dramatic poems, including verse, monologues and closet dramas.

Dramatic poetry is a form of theatrical expression that, in the European tradition, dates back to the ancient Greek dramas of Aristophanes, Sophocles and others. Although poetic verse is no longer widely used in modern drama, some of history's most renowned plays are in the form of dramatic poetry. Within this genre, there are different types of dramatic poems, including verse, monologues and closet dramas.

Dramatic Poetry

Dramatic poetry is essentially any poetic verse that is meant to be spoken as well as performed by actors in front of an audience. In early Greek drama, both comedies and tragedies were written in verse, as characters in these plays were usually gods or kings, who were expected to speak in a stylized and articulate manner befitting their station. Prior to the 19th century in the West, drama typically took the form of poetic verse. Playwrights such as William Shakespeare used verse as a medium that could communicate a more complex portrayal of a character's emotions and motivations than prose.

Dramatic Verse

Dramatic verse can be found in any play or other form of dramatic work that is written in poetic form. Beyond its ancient Greek origins, dramatic verse was widely used in Britain during the Renaissance. Among the leading practitioners of this genre were English playwrights Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, who innovated the form substantially by developing new techniques in both poetic form and dramatic structure. Since the 19th century, there has been a decline in the popularity of dramatic verse as audiences became more accustomed to the prose dramas of playwrights such as George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen.

Closet Drama

Sometime around 1800 the closet drama became fashionable. Closet dramas were written in verse form, but were meant to be read aloud, not performed by actors. The leading writers who worked in this form were Lord Byron with "Don Juan" and Percy Bysshe Shelley with "Prometheus Unbound." The 19th century also saw the rise of opera, in which verses were set to music and sung instead of merely recited. Closet drama also faded in popularity in the 20th century. In his 1960 collection of essays, "A Voice From the Attic," Canadian writer Robertson Davies describes closet drama as the "dreariest of literature."

Dramatic Monologues

While a dramatic monologue is written in verse, it is different from a poetic soliloquy found within a play, in which a character delivers a monologue in verse form though the rest of the play may be written in prose. The dramatic monologue was one of the favored forms of 19th-century British poet Robert Browning, whose works in this genre include "The Last Duchess" and "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister." In Browning's dramatic monologues, a single narrator recites the poem in its entirety, interacting with specific people who are known to the audience only from clues within the verse.

A poem in which an imagined speaker addresses a silent listener, usually not the reader. Examples include Robert Browning's “My Last Duchess,” T.S. Eliot's “The Love Song of J.

It is basically writing like human speech. The difference between drama and novels is the purpose and the structure. Drama is written to be performed. It can consist of prose or be more like poetry, such as Shakespeare.

Types of Poetry: Free Verse. Children's author and U.S. Children's Poet Laureate J. Free verse is an open form of poetry, which in its modern form arose through the French vers libre form. It does not use consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any musical pattern. It thus tends to follow the rhythm of natural speech.

Types of Poetry: Haiku. The haiku is a Japanese poetic form that consists of three lines, with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. The haiku developed from the hokku, the opening three lines of a longer poem known as a tanka. The haiku became a separate form of poetry in the 17th century.

Types of Poetry: Limerick. A limerick is a form of verse, usually humorous and frequently rude, in five-line, predominantly anapestic trimeter with a strict rhyme scheme of AABBA, in which the first, second and fifth line rhyme, while the third and fourth lines are shorter and share a different rhyme.

Types of Poetry: Sonnet. A sonnet is a one-stanza, 14-line poem, written in iambic pentameter. The sonnet, which derived from the Italian word sonetto, meaning “a little sound or song," is "a popular classical form that has compelled poets for centuries," says Poets.org.

Dramatic Poetry

History of Dramatic Poetry. As the name may suggest, dramatic poetry was born from the dramas of Greek tragedies and Sanskrit plays. ...

Dramatic monologue is a literary form where the writer takes on the voice of a character and speaks through them. Although dramatic monologues also occur in theater and prose, the term most frequently refers to a poetic form where the poet creates a character who speaks without interruption.

Comedy is a genre of fiction that consists of discourses or works intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, film, ...

“Blank verse” is a literary term that refers to poetry written in unrhymed but metered lines, almost always iambic pentameter.

Closet Drama. A closet drama is a play that is not intended to be performed onstage, but read by a solitary reader or sometimes out loud in a small group. The contrast between closet drama and classic "stage" dramas dates back to the late eighteenth century.