Poetry

The Parnassus (1511) by Raphael: famous poets recite alongside the nine Muses atop Mount Parnassus.

Attic red-figure kathalos painting of Sappho from c. 470 BCE

Homer: Roman bust, based on Greek original

Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark (1876) is mainly in anapestic tetrameter.

The Old English epic poem Beowulf is in alliterative verse.

Divine Comedy: Dante and Beatrice see God as a point of light.

Blok's Russian poem, "Noch, ulitsa, fonar, apteka" ("Night, street, lamp, drugstore"), on a wall in Leiden

Statue of runic singer Petri Shemeikka at Kolmikulmanpuisto Park in Sortavala, Karelia

Du Fu, "On Visiting the Temple of Laozi"

The oldest known love poem. Sumerian terracotta tablet #2461 from Nippur, Iraq. Ur III period, 2037–2029 BCE. Ancient Orient Museum, Istanbul

The philosopher Confucius was influential in the developed approach to poetry and ancient music theory.

An early Chinese poetics, the Kǒngzǐ Shīlùn (孔子詩論), discussing the Shijing (Classic of Poetry)

Form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning.

- Poetry

500 related topics

Prose

Form of written or spoken language that typically exhibits a natural flow of speech and grammatical structure.

A conversation in American Sign Language

It differs from most traditional poetry, where the form has a regular structure, consisting of verse based on metre and rhyme.

Poiesis

In philosophy, poiesis (from ) is "the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before."

The School of Athens (1509–1511) by Raphael, depicting famous classical Greek philosophers in an idealized setting inspired by ancient Greek architecture.

It is related to the word poetry, which shares the same root.

Rhyme

Repetition of similar sounds in the final stressed syllables and any following syllables of two or more words.

A simplified procedure for determining whether two sounds represent the same or different phonemes

Most often, this kind of perfect rhyming is consciously used for a musical or aesthetic effect in the final position of lines within poems or songs.

Drama

Specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television.

Depiction of a scene from Shakespeare's play Richard III

Relief of a seated poet (Menander) with masks of New Comedy, 1st century BC – early 1st century AD, Princeton University Art Museum

An ivory statuette of a Roman actor of tragedy, 1st century CE.

Stage drawing from a 15th-century vernacular morality play The Castle of Perseverance (as found in the Macro Manuscript).

Colley Cibber as the extravagant and affected Lord Foppington, "brutal, evil, and smart", in Vanbrugh's The Relapse (1696).

A scene from the drama Macbeth by Kalidasa Kalakendram in Kollam city, India

Performer playing Sugriva in the Koodiyattam form of Sanskrit theatre.

A 1958 U.S.S.R. postage stamp commemorating Guan Hanqing, one of the great Chinese dramatists, who is renowned for his "zaju" plays.

Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been contrasted with the epic and the lyrical modes ever since Aristotle's Poetics (c.

Verse (poetry)

In the countable sense, a verse is formally a single metrical line in a poetic composition.

Literature

A traditional Kyrgyz manaschi performing part of the Epic of Manas at a yurt camp in Karakol, Kyrgyzstan

Limestone Kish tablet from Sumer with pictographic writing; may be the earliest known writing, 3500 BC. Ashmolean Museum

Egyptian hieroglyphs with cartouches for the name "Ramesses II", from the Luxor Temple, New Kingdom

The intricate frontispiece of the Diamond Sutra from Tang dynasty China, the world's earliest dated printed book, AD 868 (British Library)

Dante, Homer and Virgil in Raphael's Parnassus fresco (1511), key figures in the Western canon

A calligram by Guillaume Apollinaire. These are a type of poem in which the written words are arranged in such a way to produce a visual image.

Sculpture in Berlin depicting a stack of books on which are inscribed the names of great German writers.

Cover of a 1921 libretto for Giordano's opera Andrea Chénier

The Library of the Palais Bourbon in Paris

Soviet poet Anna Akhmatova (1922), whose works were condemned and censored by the Stalinist authorities

Literature broadly is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry.

Metre (poetry)

In poetry, metre (Commonwealth spelling) or meter (American spelling; see spelling differences) is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse.