Poetry

Poetry (the term derives from a variant of the Greek term, poiesis, "making") is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language—such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre—to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning.

Literature is classified according to whether it is fiction or non-fiction, and whether it is poetry or prose.

Poetry has a very long history, dating back to prehistorical times with the creation of hunting poetry in Africa, and panegyric and elegiac court poetry was developed extensively throughout the history of the empires of the Nile, Niger and Volta river valleys.

The earliest poetry is believed to have been recited or sung, employed as a way of remembering oral history, genealogy, and law.

Later attempts concentrated on features such as repetition, verse form and rhyme, and emphasized the aesthetics which distinguish poetry from more objectively informative, prosaic forms of writing. Readers accustomed to identifying poetry with Dante, Goethe, Mickiewicz and Rumi may think of it as written in lines based on rhyme and regular meter; there are, however, traditions, such as Biblical poetry, that use other means to create rhythm and euphony.

Most often, this kind of "perfect" rhyming is consciously used for effect in the final positions of lines of poems and songs.

Later attempts concentrated on features such as repetition, verse form and rhyme, and emphasized the aesthetics which distinguish poetry from more objectively informative, prosaic forms of writing. Readers accustomed to identifying poetry with Dante, Goethe, Mickiewicz and Rumi may think of it as written in lines based on rhyme and regular meter; there are, however, traditions, such as Biblical poetry, that use other means to create rhythm and euphony.

A line is a unit of language into which a poem or play is divided, which operates on principles which are distinct from and not necessarily coincident with grammatical structures, such as the sentence or single clauses in sentences.

Ancient Greek attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle's Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song and comedy.

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. 335 BC)—the earliest work of dramatic theory.

Poetry (the term derives from a variant of the Greek term, poiesis, "making") is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language—such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre—to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning. Later attempts concentrated on features such as repetition, verse form and rhyme, and emphasized the aesthetics which distinguish poetry from more objectively informative, prosaic forms of writing.

Prose is a form of language that exhibits a natural flow of speech and grammatical structure rather than a regular rhythmic structure as in traditional poetry, where the common unit of verse is based on metre or rhyme.

The use of ambiguity, symbolism, irony and other stylistic elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations.

and the metaphors used in the writing of poetry.

Readers accustomed to identifying poetry with Dante, Goethe, Mickiewicz and Rumi may think of it as written in lines based on rhyme and regular meter; there are, however, traditions, such as Biblical poetry, that use other means to create rhythm and euphony. More recently, thinkers have struggled to find a definition that could encompass formal differences as great as those between Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Matsuo Bashō's Oku no Hosomichi, as well as differences in content spanning Tanakh religious poetry, love poetry, and rap.

The ancient Hebrews perceived that there were poetical portions in their sacred texts, as shown by their entitling as songs or chants passages such as Exodus 15:1-19 and Numbers 21:17-20; a song or chant is, according to the primary meaning of the term, poetry.

Some poetry types are specific to particular cultures and genres and respond to characteristics of the language in which the poet writes. Later aestheticians identified three major genres: epic poetry, lyric poetry, and dramatic poetry, treating comedy and tragedy as subgenres of dramatic poetry.

Poetry (odes, epics, etc.), prose, and performance each had a specific and calculated style that related to the theme of the story.

Devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhythm are sometimes used to achieve musical or incantatory effects.

Vocalic assonance is an important element in verse.

The earliest entries in the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry, the Shijing, were initially lyrics.

Chinese poetry is poetry written, spoken, or chanted in the Chinese language.

Similarly, figures of speech such as metaphor, simile and metonymy create a resonance between otherwise disparate images—a layering of meanings, forming connections previously not perceived.

In addition to its use in everyday speech, metonymy is a figure of speech in some poetry and in much rhetoric.

The efforts of ancient thinkers to determine what makes poetry distinctive as a form, and what distinguishes good poetry from bad, resulted in "poetics"—the study of the aesthetics of poetry.

It may refer specifically to the theory of poetry, although some speakers use the term so broadly as to denote the concept of "theory" itself.

Later aestheticians identified three major genres: epic poetry, lyric poetry, and dramatic poetry, treating comedy and tragedy as subgenres of dramatic poetry.

Verse drama is any drama written as verse to be spoken; another possible general term is poetic drama.

The underlying concept of the poet as creator is not uncommon, and some modernist poets essentially do not distinguish between the creation of a poem with words, and creative acts in other media.

Modernist poetry refers to poetry written, mainly in Europe and North America, between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature, but the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors, including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases of the critic setting the dates.

Meter is the definitive pattern established for a verse (such as iambic pentameter), while rhythm is the actual sound that results from a line of poetry. Thus, "iambic pentameter" is a meter comprising five feet per line, in which the predominant kind of foot is the "iamb".

Iambic pentameter is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama.

In addition to a boom in translation, during the Romantic period numerous ancient works were rediscovered.

Except for some extreme metaphrasers in the early Christian period and the Middle Ages, and adapters in various periods (especially pre-Classical Rome, and the 18th century), translators have generally shown prudent flexibility in seeking equivalents—"literal" where possible, paraphrastic where necessary—for the original meaning and other crucial "values" (e.g., style, verse form, concordance with musical accompaniment or, in films, with speech articulatory movements) as determined from context.

Prosody also may be used more specifically to refer to the scanning of poetic lines to show meter.

Scansion (, rhymes with mansion; verb: to scan), or a system of scansion, is the method or practice of determining and (usually) graphically representing the metrical pattern of a line of verse.

More recently, thinkers have struggled to find a definition that could encompass formal differences as great as those between Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Matsuo Bashō's Oku no Hosomichi, as well as differences in content spanning Tanakh religious poetry, love poetry, and rap.

While the poetic work became seminal of its own account, the poet's travels in the text have since inspired many people to follow in his footsteps and trace his journey for themselves.

In the case of free verse, rhythm is often organized based on looser units of cadence rather than a regular meter.

Free verse is an open form of poetry.

Later aestheticians identified three major genres: epic poetry, lyric poetry, and dramatic poetry, treating comedy and tragedy as subgenres of dramatic poetry.

In the wake of Aristotle's Poetics (335 BCE), tragedy has been used to make genre distinctions, whether at the scale of poetry in general (where the tragic divides against epic and lyric) or at the scale of the drama (where tragedy is opposed to comedy).

Kindred forms of resonance may exist, between individual verses, in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm.

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

Metrical rhythm generally involves precise arrangements of stresses or syllables into repeated patterns called feet within a line.

The foot is the basic repeating rhythmic unit that forms part of a line of verse in most Indo-European traditions of poetry, including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry.

Classical Chinese poetics, based on the tone system of Middle Chinese, recognized two kinds of tones: the level (平 píng) tone and the oblique (仄 zè) tones, a category consisting of the rising (上 sháng) tone, the departing (去 qù) tone and the entering (入 rù) tone.

Shi and shih are romanizations of the character undefined or undefined, the Chinese word for all poetry generally and across all languages.

Thus, "iambic pentameter" is a meter comprising five feet per line, in which the predominant kind of foot is the "iamb".

An iamb or iambus is a metrical foot used in various types of poetry.