What is the best way to write poetry?

The way to write poetry ranges from doggerel to odes in rhymed poetry and from haiku to epic iambic pentameter in unrhymed poetry.

When most people first think of writing poetry, they think of rhymed verse. This is what they are accustomed to seeing on greeting cards and hearing in song lyrics. They may begin by writing something as simple as:

Roses are red, violets are blue.
Sugar is sweet, and so are you.

This is a couplet, two lines whose last sounds rhyme. It is a basic building block, and poems (verses) of any length can be constructed simply by writing one couplet after another until you have finished saying whatever it is you want to say. An example of that would be Ogden Nash's doggerel:

The cobra fills his mouth with venom
And walks upon his duodenum,
And he who trifles with a cobra
Is soon a sadder he, and sobra.

Another basic building block for rhymed verse is the quatrain, which is four lines of verse in which the second and fourth rhyme, whether the first and third do, or not, as in many ballads. Example: (my own)

Out of the West there came a man
(Or was it the East, or North?)
At any rate, it was he who came
When the council said, "Come forth."

This form, too, usually continues, quatrain upon quatrain, until the story is told.

Despite the impression you may have received from the examples given above, rhymed verse is not necessarily humorous, nor does it always have such simple rhyme schemes. Much of traditional English poetry exhibits very disciplined format, with strict rhythm and rhyme schemes. Examples of these would be odes, sonnets, and triplets.

Some rhyme schemes are interlocked and require great skill to maintain, such as aba bcb cdc ded efe fgf ghg. Others, like the sonnets, are traditional, such as the Italian abbaabba cdecde, and the Shakespearian abab bcbc cdcd ee. Sonnets also impose a further constraint on the poet in that they traditionally have an iambic pentameter rhythm scheme. Apparently, poets liked the challenge of pre-determined rhyme and rhythm schemes, since so much classic poetry is written in those forms.

Unrhymed poetry has been around for a long time, too, despite the fact that it is not what people generally mean when they say poetry. This can be as disciplined as the blank verse of Shakespeare's plays and Tennyson's "Idylls of the King," being set in a pattern of iambic pentameter, lines of five iambic feet per line, or as free-wheeling as what is now called free verse.

Free verse consists of lines of variable length with patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables, which often appear quite random. In fact, some poorly written free verse often appears to be nothing but prose broken up into random-length lines. But well written free verse, especially when spoken aloud, will assert its poetic quality unmistakably. A classic example of that would be Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address." Although that speech is usually printed as prose, it is free verse of the highest quality.