Poetry of the Renaissance

When we think of poetry, we often think of short, funny poems like the works of Shel Silverstein or Dr. Seuss. These poems are popular today with both children and adults. For many years, however, other types of poetry were just as popular.


Anyone who takes an interest in poetry will soon find that there is a whole body of classic poetry that was popular for hundreds of years. Poets like Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare set a high standard for English poetry back in the days of the Renaissance.


If you go to college and major in English one day, you will get to know some of these poems. There are lyric, epic, and pastoral poems. You will study the famed sonnets: formal poems with set patterns of lines, rhythm, and rhyme. You will study poems written in iambic pentameter, the pattern of ten-syllable lines in which every other syllable is stressed. Poets of the Renaissance enjoyed the challenge of working within the strict rules of these formal poems.


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