Poetry can touch us, move us, delight us, enlighten us, make us laugh, make us cry, and both
Soften and enrich our deepest memories. Poems are the ties that bind one stranger to another, often in friendship, sometimes in love, always in understanding.
There are many different kinds of poems. Poems may have rhyme, but they don’t have to. Poetry is divided into three types: lyrics（抒情诗）, narrative（叙事诗）, and dramatic（戏剧诗）.
Lyric poetry is the most common kind. It imitates most short poems. Lyric may be set to music and song. Odes（颂歌）, elegies（挽歌）and sonnets（十四行诗） are longer lyric poems. The ode is very structured. It may be written to praise a person or to celebrate an important event. Elegies have to do with death. Sonnets are fourteen line poems with a special rhyme pattern. Often they are love poems.
Narrative poetry tells stories. The most important kinds of narrative poems are ballads and epics. Ballads tell stories about individuals. They are meant to be sung. The epic is probably the oldes form of poetry. Epics are long poems that tell about the heroic deeds of a character. “ The Odyssey” is one of the best known epics. Many cultures have epics about their histories and legends.
Dramatic poetry also tells stories, but the characters act out the tales. The dialogue is written in rhyme. Shakespeare is the most famous dramatic poet.
生词集锦：
1、lyrics抒情诗 2、narrative叙事诗 3、dramatic戏剧诗
4、ode颂歌 5、elegy 挽歌 6、sonnet十四行诗
7、ballad民谣 8、epic史诗 9、individual个人，个体

(B) Shakespeare and his works
For any Englishman, there can never be any discussion as to who is the world’s greatest poet and dramatist. Only one name can possibly suggest itself to him: that of William Shakespeare. Every Englishman has some knowledge, however slight, of the work of our greatest writer. All of us use words, phrases and quotations from Shakespeare’s writings that have become part of the common possession of English-speaking people. Most of the time we probably don’t realize the source of the words we use, rather like the old lady who was taken to see a performance of Hamlet and complained that it was full of well-known proverbs and quotations!
Shakespeare, more perhaps than any other writer, made full use of the great resources of the English language. Most of us use about five thousand words in our normal employment of English; Shakespeare in his works used about twenty-five thousand! There is probably no better way for a foreigner ( or an Englishman) to appreciate the richness and variety of the English language than by studying the various ways in which Shakespeare used it. Such a study is well worth the effort ( it is not, of course, recommended to beginners), even though some aspects of English usage, and the meaning of many words, have changed since Shakespeare’s day.
Shakespeare was born in 1564 in Stratford-on-Avon and died there in 1616. He almost certainly attended the Grammar School in the town, but of this we cannot be sure. We know he was married there in 1582 to Anne Hathaway and that he had three children, a boy and two girls. We know that he spent much of his life in London writing his masterpieces. But this is almost all that we do know.