Poetry

===Narrative poetry===
[[File:Chaucer Hoccleve.png|thumb|upright|[[Chaucer]]]]
{{Main|Narrative poetry}}
Narrative poetry is a genre of poetry that tells a [[narrative|story]]. Broadly it subsumes [[epic poetry]], but the term "narrative poetry" is often reserved for smaller works, generally with more appeal to [[human interest]]. Narrative poetry may be the oldest type of poetry. Many scholars of [[Homer]] have concluded that his ''[[Iliad]]'' and ''[[Odyssey]]'' were composed of compilations of shorter narrative poems that related individual episodes. Much narrative poetry—such as Scottish and English [[ballad]]s, and [[Balts|Baltic]] and [[Slavic peoples|Slavic]] heroic poems—is [[performance poetry]] with roots in a preliterate [[oral tradition]]. It has been speculated that some features that distinguish poetry from prose, such as meter, [[alliteration]] and [[kenning]]s, once served as [[memory]] aids for [[bard]]s who recited traditional tales.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Kirk |first=G. S. |title=Homer and the Oral Tradition |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2010 |isbn=978-0-521-13671-6 |edition=reprint |pages=22–45}}</ref>

Notable narrative poets have included [[Ovid]], [[Dante]], [[Juan Ruiz]], [[William Langland]], [[Geoffrey Chaucer|Chaucer]], [[Fernando de Rojas]], [[Luís de Camões]], [[Shakespeare]], [[Alexander Pope]], [[Robert Burns]], [[Adam Mickiewicz]], [[Alexander Pushkin]], [[Letitia Elizabeth Landon]], [[Edgar Allan Poe]], [[Alfred Tennyson]], and [[Anne Carson]].