FROM The Art of Biblical Poetry, Robert Alter, (New York, Basic Books 1985)
Chapter  5  - Forms of Faith in Psalms

OF all the Books of the Bible in which poetry plays a role, Psalms is the one set of texts whose poetic status has been most strongly felt throughout the generations, […]. This unwavering perception that the psalms were formal poems […] was no doubt reinforced by the musical indications in the texts themselves. Many of the psalms, that is, are explicitly presented as liturgical songs to be intoned to the accompaniment of the lyre, the ten-stringed instrument, cymbals, drums, and whatever else was once used to fill the temple courts with melody. The name of the book in Western languages, from the Greek psalmos, a song sung to a plucked instrument, stresses this musical character, as does the full Hebrew title, mizmorei tehillim, “songs of praise.”

 [That the psalms repeat conventional texts over and over] is perfectly understandable. For a text that is to be chanted by pilgrims in procession on their way up the temple mount, or recited by a supplicant at the altar or by someone recovered from grave illness offering a thanksgiving sacrifice, you don’t want a lot of fancy footwork in the imagery and syntax; you want, in fact, an eloquent rehearsal of traditional materials and even traditional ways of ordering those materials in a certain sequence.

 This conventionality of the psalms, […] is in so many instances to the liturgical function of the poems,

[The psalms are] a collection where in any given genre a dozen or more poems seem to be saying the same thing, often with more or less the same metaphors and sometimes even with some of the same phrasing. What I think we need to be more attuned to as readers is the nuanced individual character—“originality” in fact may not be the relevant concept—of different poems reflecting the same genre and even many of the same formulaic devices.   

 Poetry, working through a system of complex linkages of sound, image, word, rhythm, syntax, theme, idea, is an instrument for conveying densely patterned meanings, and sometimes contradictory meanings, that are not readily conveyable through other kinds of discourse.

 Poetry is a way of using language strongly oriented toward the creation of minute, multiple, heterogeneous, and semantically fruitful interconnections in the text. […]

 The psalms are of course poems written out of deep and often passionate faith. […] the poetic medium made it possible to articulate the emotional freight, the moral consequences, the altered perception of the world that flowed from this monotheistic belief, in compact verbal structures that could in some instances seem simplicity itself.

 Psalms […]  often became an instrument for expressing in a collective voice (whether first person plural or singular) a distinctive, sometimes radically new, sense of time, space, history, creation, and the character of individual destiny.

 In keeping with this complex expressive purpose, many psalms, on scrutiny, prove to have a finely tensile semantic weave that one would not expect from the seeming conventionality of the language.

Hermann Gunkel described five basic types"

Hymns

Communal Laments

Individual Laments

Individual Thanksgiving psalms

and Royal Psalms.

An expanded classification could include:

Joyful songs rejoicing in circumstances, praising the goodness and [general] providence of God

Glorify God and the powerful works that God has done.

Highlight and celebrate a particular reason for their happiness. 

recount the past, and point to the works and promises of God.

Employ bold regal imagery of thrones, coronations, and processions - usually depict a king or God as king.

Wisdom literature: instruction on how to live lives well. 

Cry out to God in the midst of emotional and spiritual turmoil.

Often closely linked with laments, these cry to God to send judgment on enemies. 

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