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“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.” by P.B. Shelley

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“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.” by P.B. Shelley

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https://www.flavorwire.com/413949/20-poets-on-the-meaning-of-poetry

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We've been thinking about poet Meena Alexander's incredible address to the Yale Political Union, in which she refers to Shelley's 1821 essay, A Defence of Poetry. The English poet's work famously stated, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Alexander concludes: "The poem is an invention that exists in spite of history... In a time of violence, the task of poetry is in some way to reconcile us to our world and to allow us a measure of tenderness and grace with which to exist... Poetry's task is to reconcile us to the world - not to accept it at face value or to assent to things that are wrong, but to reconcile one in a larger sense, to return us in love, the province of the imagination, to the scope of our mortal lives." Other poets have attempted to interpret "what is deeply felt and is essentially unsayable." Here are a few brief definitions of poetry by famous poets.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
There are a few more choice snippets from Shelley's 1821 essay, A Defence of Poetry , that articulated the essence of poetry:

"Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odor and the color of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption."

"Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."

"Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression of the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man."

"Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."

"Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."

"All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially."
Emily Dickinson
"If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?"
Robert Frost
"Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."

"Poetry is what gets lost in translation."
Salvatore Quasimodo
"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own."
Edgar Allan Poe
"I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth."
Mary Oliver
"Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that."
T.S. Eliot
"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."
William Wordsworth
"I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind."
Philip Larkin
"As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief n 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people."
Matthew Arnold
"Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life - to the question: How to live."
Dylan Thomas
"Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own."

From Carl Sandburg's "Tentative (First Model): Definitions of Poetry":

1. Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.

2. Poetry is an art practised with the terribly plastic material of human language.

3. Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, 'Listen!' and 'Did you see it' 'Did you hear it? What was it?'

4. Poetry is the tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.

5. Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.

6. Poetry is a puppet-show, where riders of skyrockets and divers of sea fathoms gossip about the sixth sense and the fourth dimension.

7. Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.

8. Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.

9. Poetry is an echo asking a shadow dancer to be a partner.

10. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air.

Read the rest, here.
John Cage
"There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing."
Kahlil Gibran
"Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary."
William Hazlitt
"Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life."

"The light of poetry is not only a direct but also a reflected light, that, while it shows us the object, throws a sparkling radiance on all around it: the flame of the passions, communicated to the imagination, reveals to us, as with a flash of lightning, the inmost recesses of thought, and penetrates our whole being. Poetry represents forms chiefly as they suggest other forms; feelings, as they suggest forms or other feelings. Poetry puts a spirit of life and motion into the universe. It describes the flowing, not the fixed. It does not define the limits of sense, or analyze the distinctions of the understanding, but signifies the excess of the imagination beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or feeling."
Rita Dove
"Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful."
Edith Sitwell
"Poetry is the deification of reality."
Marianne Moore
"Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads."
Theodore Roethke
"You must believe: a poem is a holy thing - a good poem, that is."

"The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods."
James K. Baxter
"The poem is a plank laid over the lion's den."

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We've been thinking about poet Meena Alexander's incredible address to the Yale Political Union, in which she refers to Shelley's 1821 essay, A Defence of Poetry. The English poet's work famously stated, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Alexander concludes: "The poem is an invention that exists in spite of history...

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"Poetry is a type of literature based on the interplay of words and rhythm. It often employs rhyme and meter (a set of rules governing the number and arrangement of syllables in each line). In poetry, words are strung together to form sounds, images, and ideas that might be too complex or abstract to describe directly."

https://literaryterms.net/poetry/

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I. What is Poetry?

Poetry is a type of literature based on the interplay of words and rhythm. It often employs rhyme and meter (a set of rules governing the number and arrangement of syllables in each line). In poetry, words are strung together to form sounds, images, and ideas that might be too complex or abstract to describe directly.

Poetry was once written according to fairly strict rules of meter and rhyme, and each culture had its own rules. For example, Anglo-Saxon poets had their own rhyme schemes and meters, while Greek poets and Arabic poets had others. Although these classical forms are still widely used today, modern poets frequently do away with rules altogether - their poems generally do not rhyme, and do not fit any particular meter. These poems, however, still have a rhythmic quality and seek to create beauty through their words.

The opposite of poetry is "prose" - that is, normal text that runs without line breaks or rhythm. This article, for example, is written in prose.

II. Examples and Explanation
Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man. (Homer, The Odyssey)
The Greek poet Homer wrote some of the ancient world's most famous literature. He wrote in a style called epic poetry, which deals with gods, heroes, monsters, and other large-scale "epic" themes. Homer's long poems tell stories of Greek heroes like Achilles and Odysseus, and have inspired countless generations of poets, novelists, and philosophers alike.

Poetry gives powerful insight into the cultures that create it. Because of this, fantasy and science fiction authors often create poetry for their invented cultures. J.R.R. Tolkien famously wrote different kinds of poetry for elves, dwarves, hobbits, and humans, and the rhythms and subject matter of their poetry was supposed to show how these races differed from one another. In a more humorous vein, many Star Trek fans have taken to writing love poetry in the invented Klingon language.

III. The Importance of Poetry

Poetry is probably the oldest form of literature, and probably predates the origin of writing itself. The oldest written manuscripts we have are poems, mostly epic poems telling the stories of ancient mythology. Examples include the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Vedas (sacred texts of Hinduism). This style of writing may have developed to help people memorize long chains of information in the days before writing. Rhythm and rhyme can make the text more memorable, and thus easier to preserve for cultures that do not have a written language.

Poetry can be written with all the same purposes as any other kind of literature - beauty, humor, storytelling, political messages, etc.

IV. Examples in of Poetry Literature

This is an excerpt from Joyce Kilmer's famous short poem. The poem employs a fairly standard rhyme scheme (AABB, lines 1 and 2 rhymes together and lines 3 and 4 rhymes together), and a meter called "iambic tetrameter," which is commonly employed in children's rhymes.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,

starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking

for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly

connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking...

(Alan Ginsberg, Howl)

These are the first few lines of Howl, one of the most famous examples of modern "free verse" poetry. It has no rhyme, and no particular meter. But its words still have a distinct, rhythmic quality, and the line breaks encapsulate the meaning of the poem. Notice how the last word of each line contributes to the imagery of a corrupt, ravaged city ("madness, naked, smoking"), with one exception: "heavenly." This powerful juxtaposition goes to the heart of Ginsburg's intent in writing the poem - though what that intent is, you'll have to decide for yourself.

In the twilight rain,

these brilliant-hued hibiscus -

A lovely sunset

This poem by the Japanese poet Basho is a haiku. This highly influential Japanese style has no rhymes, but it does have a very specific meter - five syllables in the first line, seven in the second line, and five in the third line.

V. Examples of Poetry in Popular Culture

Rapping originated as a kind of performance poetry. In the 1960s and 70s, spoken word artists like Gil Scott-Heron began performing their poems over live or synthesized drumbeats, a practice that sparked all of modern hip hop. Even earlier, the beat poets of the 1950s sometimes employed drums in their readings.

Some of the most famous historical poems have been turned into movies or inspired episodes of television shows. Beowulf, for example, is an Anglo-Saxon epic poem that has spawned at least 8 film adaptations, most recently a 2007 animated film starring Angelina Jolie and Anthony Hopkins. Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven has also inspired many pop culture spinoffs with its famous line, "Nevermore."

VI. Related Terms (with examples)

Verse

Nearly all poems are written in verse - that is, they have line breaks and meter (rhythm). But verse is also used in other areas of literature. For example, Shakespeare's characters often speak in verse. Their dialogue is separated into rhythmic lines just like a song, but they are supposed to be speaking normally.

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Poetry: Definition and Examples | LiteraryTerms.net

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Clear definition and great examples of Poetry. This article will show you the importance of Poetry and how to use it. Poetry is a type of literature based on the interplay of words and rhythm. It often employs rhyme and meter

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"In order to create powerful images and tap into people’s emotions, poets use poetic techniques to make their poetry impactful and interesting."
https://www.twinkl.com/teaching-wiki/poetry

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Learn all about the different forms and features of poetry, the difference between prose and poetry, and how writers use poetic techniques to create images and stir emotions.

Features of poetry and poetic techniques

In order to create powerful images and tap into people's emotions, poets use poetic techniques to make their poetry impactful and interesting.

Not all poems will use the same techniques, but the most common features of poetry are:

1. Rhyme

Rhyming schemes dictate how a poem flows - and rhymes can even sometimes alter the meaning of a poem altogether. One of the most common rhyme schemes is the rhyming couplet, where the final words in a pair of lines rhyme. These kinds of rhymes can create a musical and happy tone to a poem, and are frequently used in ballads and lyrical poetry. Some poetry, such as free verse, does not use a consistent rhyming scheme.

2. Rhythm

Think of rhythm as the beat of the poem, also known as meter. It is created by using carefully considered numbers of words or syllables in each line or stanza. Rhythm can also be created with sound devices, such as alliteration or assonance. Iambic pentameter is a form of poetic rhythm characterized by a line of verse where one unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable. This technique is most famously used in Shakespeare's plays and poetry, and it follows the rhythm of a heartbeat.

For example:

3. Alliteration

Alliteration is the repetition of sounds through consecutive (or closely connected) words. An example of alliteration is when two or more words in a row begin with the same letter or sound. E.g., big blue butterflies.

4. Figurative Language

Poets often use figurative language devices like similes and metaphors to create images and describe thoughts, emotions, objects, and more.

A simile compares one thing directly to another thing, often by using the "as as" combination. For example:

A metaphor says that one thing is another thing. For example:

By comparing one thing to another, poets can create fascinating images in their poetry to stir a reader's emotions!

5. Symbolism

Symbolism is used to convey an idea, message, theme, or relationship in a poem. For instance, an object or character can represent an abstract idea that's difficult to describe otherwise. Most famously, roses, hearts, and moons in poetry are used to symbolize romantic love.

To help your children learn the features of poetry, our in-house educators have created some helpful language arts resources for you to access - like this awesome Rhyme Scheme Activity, above.

Types of Poem

Cinquain

The American is a five-line stanza or poem, which is usually written in iambic pentameter, without rhyme, and each line has a defined number of . Line 1 has two syllables, line 2 has four syllables, line 3 has six, line 4 has eight, and line 5 has two syllables again.

The cinquain form of poem was invented by Adelaide Crapsey around 100 years ago. She was an American poet who took inspiration from Japanese kinds of poetry like and.

Haiku

Originating in Japan, the haiku is a three-line poem that has five syllables in the first and last line, and seven syllables in the middle line. They often depict an image of nature.

Sonnet

A sonnet is a poem with 14 lines that is traditionally about the topic of love. They have internal rhymes and typically end with a heroic couplet (a rhyming couplet written in iambic pentameter). William Shakespeare popularized this form. He wrote 154 sonnets over the course of his lifetime!

Famous poets and poems

Explore these classic poems and poets when you are teaching children about poetry.

For younger children:

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What is Poetry? | Poetry Terms Definition

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Learn all about the different forms and features of poetry, the difference between prose and poetry, and how writers use poetic techniques to create images and stir emotions. In order to create powerful images and tap into people's emotions, poets use poetic techniques to make their poetry impactful and interesting.

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Poetry expresses strong emotions, or stories, through the sounds and arrangement of language.

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(Poetry is) an imaginative response to experience reflecting a keen awareness of language
https://tiatalk.me/2007/02/19/what-is-poetry-a-list-of-50-definitions/

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Why is it that everyone can identify poetry, but no one can define it? No matter how comprehensive the description, there is always a poem that doesn't quite fit the given parameters. And yet, despite its many forms and styles, many people have a firm idea that they do or don't like poetry. This is often based on exposure to a very few examples, and often in a coercive setting (i.e. school!). What kind of poetic expression speaks to you? Is it possible that one you haven't met yet will do the trick?

I'll start the list with a definition of my own and add several more that I've come across, in no particular order (yet). Please feel free to use Comments to suggest others-your own or anyone else's (please only give definitions of "poetry"-we'll do "poet" and other related items later!). Ultimately, I'll compile a categorised resource page with the final results and acknowledge any contributions that usefully expand this list.

1. Poetry is an attempt to capture the essence of the chord struck in the poet by an instant of insight, in such a way that the same music will sound in the soul of the reader. Tia Azulay

2. poem n. a composition in metre : a composition of high beauty of thought or language and artistic form, in verse or prose : a creation, achievement, etc, marked by beauty or artistry. Chambers Student Dictionary

3. Poetry is emotion put into measure. Thomas Hardy

4. Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions. William Hazlitt

5. ... not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer-is the peculiar function of poetry. A.E. Housman

6. Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. Christopher Fry

7. Poetry is a rhythmical form of words which express an imaginative-emotional-intellectual experience of the writer's...in such a way that it creates a similar experience in the mind of his reader or listener. Clive Sansom

8. Poetry is the spontaneous outflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquillity. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 1802

9. (Poetry is) literature in metrical form : any communication resembling poetry in beauty or the evocation of feeling
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

10. Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own. Salvatore Quasimodo

11. Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry

12. Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is. James Branch Cabell

13. (Poetry is) a kind of ingenious nonsense. Isaac Newton

14. (Poetry is) a literary expression in which words are used in a concentrated blend of sound and imagery to create an emotional response www.iclasses.org/assets/literature/literary_glossary.cfm

15. Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. Carl Sandburg

16. A poem begins with a lump in the throat, a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where the emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words. Robert Frost

17. Poetry is what gets lost in translation. Robert Frost

18. A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.
Dylan Thomas

19. Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822)

20. Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965), "Tradition and the Individual Talent", II (The Sacred Wood, 1922)

21. Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech. Simonides (556 BC - 468 BC)

22. (Poetry) is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake. Lord Byron (1788 - 1824)

23. Poetry is the deification of reality. Edith Sitwell (1887 - 1964), Life magazine, 01-04-63

24. Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is go where they can find you. Winnie-the-Pooh, Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired by A. A. Milne

25. Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. Carl Sandburg, Poetry Considered

26. Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821

27. Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech. Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

28. Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)

29. (Poetry is) texts in rhythmic form, often employing rhyme and usually shorter and more concentrated in language and ideas than either prose or drama www.longman.co.uk/tt_seceng/resources/glosauth.htm

30. Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history. Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

31. Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. Leonard Cohen

32. Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing. Edmund Burke

33. Poetry is basically anything that calls itself a poem. www.trinityhigh.com/curric/english/literat/glossary.htm

34. Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. Rita Dove

35. Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. Kahlil Gibran

36. Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. Thomas Gray

37. Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. William Hazlitt

38. (Poetry is) an imaginative response to experience reflecting a keen awareness of language. Its first characteristic is rhythm, marked by regularity far surpassing that of prose. Poetry's rhyme affords an obvious difference from prose. Because poetry is relatively short, it is likely to be characterized by compactness and intense unity. Poetry insists on the specific and the concrete.
www.armour.k12.sd.us/Mary's%20Classes/literary_terms_glossary.htm

39. Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. Samuel Johnson

40. Poetry should... strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. John Keats

41. Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. Edgar Allan Poe

42. Poetry: the best words in the best order. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

43. The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse... the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars. Aristotle, On Poetics

44. Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. Marianne Moore

45. Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. Carl Sandburg

46. Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. Novalis

47. There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing. John Cage

48. Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them. Charles Simic

49. Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense at all events; just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

50. The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life. Robert Penn Warren

Acknowledgements: Although most of the above quotes are available from many sources, and I've encountered many of them before, I am grateful to Brainy Quote, Quotations Page, Quoteland, Quote World and The Quote Garden for either reminding me or making my search easier.

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Why is it that everyone can identify poetry, but no one can define it? No matter how comprehensive the description, there is always a poem that doesn't quite fit the given parameters. And yet, despite its many forms and styles, many people have a firm idea that they do or don't like poetry.

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Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
https://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/poets_on_poetry.htm

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Famous quotations about poetry:

'Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.'

'A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightening five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.'

'Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.'

'Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones.'
(To Miss Hannah More, who had expressed a wonder that the poet who had written Paradise Lost should write such poor sonnets.)

'Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.'

'Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.'

'Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.'

'...nine-tenths of what passes as English poetry is the product of either careerism, or keeping one's hand in: a choice between vulgarity and banality.'

'Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.'

'Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.'

'No man can read Hardy's poems collected but that his own life, and forgotten moments of it, will come back to him, in a flash here and an hour there. Have you a better test of true poetry?'

'I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is prose; words in their best order; - poetry; the best words in the best order.'

'Well, write poetry, for God's sake, it's the only thing that matters.'

'In my view a good poem is one in which the form of the verse and the joining of its parts seems light as a shallow river flowing over its sandy bed.'

'Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realising that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstractions.'

'Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.'

'Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.'

'I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.'

'Poetry fettered fetters the human race.'

'Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing
Did certain persons die before they sing.'

'The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given , the emotion is immediately evoked.'

'To break the pentameter, that was the first heave.'

'Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own.'

'I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.'

'The poet is the priest of the invisible.'

'Poetry is, at bottom, a criticism of life.'

'The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.'

'As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly-created universe, and therefore have no belief in 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people.'

'I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.'

'You I am sure will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and 'load every rift' of your subject with ore.'

'Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.'

'I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.'

'If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.'

'There are three things, after all, that a poem must reach: the eye, the ear, and what we may call the heart or the mind. It is most important of all to reach the heart of the reader.'

'Modesty is a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.'

'Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.'

'Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.'

'I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.'

'Poets aren't very useful. / Because they aren't consumeful or very produceful.'

'I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman.'

'Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.'

'It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.'

'Everybody has their own idea of what's a poet. Robert Frost, President Johnson, T.S.Eliot, Rudolf Valentino - they're all poets. I like to think of myself as the one who carries the light bulb.'

'In this poor body, composed of one hundred bones and nine openings, is something called spirit, a flimsy curtain swept this way and that by the slightest breeze. It is spirit, such as it is, which led me to poetry, at first little more than a pastime, then the full business of my life. There have been times when my spirit, so dejected, almost gave up the quest, other times when it was proud, triumphant. So it has been from the very start, never finding peace with itself, always doubting the worth of what it makes.'

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Famous quotations about poetry: 'Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.' 'A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightening five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.'

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Poetry is a type of literature that conveys a thought, describes a scene or tells a story in a concentrated, lyrical arrangement of words.

Poetry 101: Learn About Poetry, Different Types of Poems ...

https://www.masterclass.com › articles › poetry-101-lea...

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Poetry is a type of literature based on the interplay of words and rhythm.

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I. What is Poetry?

Poetry is a type of literature based on the interplay of words and rhythm. It often employs rhyme and meter (a set of rules governing the number and arrangement of syllables in each line). In poetry, words are strung together to form sounds, images, and ideas that might be too complex or abstract to describe directly.

Poetry was once written according to fairly strict rules of meter and rhyme, and each culture had its own rules. For example, Anglo-Saxon poets had their own rhyme schemes and meters, while Greek poets and Arabic poets had others. Although these classical forms are still widely used today, modern poets frequently do away with rules altogether - their poems generally do not rhyme, and do not fit any particular meter. These poems, however, still have a rhythmic quality and seek to create beauty through their words.

The opposite of poetry is "prose" - that is, normal text that runs without line breaks or rhythm. This article, for example, is written in prose.

II. Examples and Explanation
Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man. (Homer, The Odyssey)
The Greek poet Homer wrote some of the ancient world's most famous literature. He wrote in a style called epic poetry, which deals with gods, heroes, monsters, and other large-scale "epic" themes. Homer's long poems tell stories of Greek heroes like Achilles and Odysseus, and have inspired countless generations of poets, novelists, and philosophers alike.

Poetry gives powerful insight into the cultures that create it. Because of this, fantasy and science fiction authors often create poetry for their invented cultures. J.R.R. Tolkien famously wrote different kinds of poetry for elves, dwarves, hobbits, and humans, and the rhythms and subject matter of their poetry was supposed to show how these races differed from one another. In a more humorous vein, many Star Trek fans have taken to writing love poetry in the invented Klingon language.

III. The Importance of Poetry

Poetry is probably the oldest form of literature, and probably predates the origin of writing itself. The oldest written manuscripts we have are poems, mostly epic poems telling the stories of ancient mythology. Examples include the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Vedas (sacred texts of Hinduism). This style of writing may have developed to help people memorize long chains of information in the days before writing. Rhythm and rhyme can make the text more memorable, and thus easier to preserve for cultures that do not have a written language.

Poetry can be written with all the same purposes as any other kind of literature - beauty, humor, storytelling, political messages, etc.

IV. Examples in of Poetry Literature

This is an excerpt from Joyce Kilmer's famous short poem. The poem employs a fairly standard rhyme scheme (AABB, lines 1 and 2 rhymes together and lines 3 and 4 rhymes together), and a meter called "iambic tetrameter," which is commonly employed in children's rhymes.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,

starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking

for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly

connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking...

(Alan Ginsberg, Howl)

These are the first few lines of Howl, one of the most famous examples of modern "free verse" poetry. It has no rhyme, and no particular meter. But its words still have a distinct, rhythmic quality, and the line breaks encapsulate the meaning of the poem. Notice how the last word of each line contributes to the imagery of a corrupt, ravaged city ("madness, naked, smoking"), with one exception: "heavenly." This powerful juxtaposition goes to the heart of Ginsburg's intent in writing the poem - though what that intent is, you'll have to decide for yourself.

In the twilight rain,

these brilliant-hued hibiscus -

A lovely sunset

This poem by the Japanese poet Basho is a haiku. This highly influential Japanese style has no rhymes, but it does have a very specific meter - five syllables in the first line, seven in the second line, and five in the third line.

V. Examples of Poetry in Popular Culture

Rapping originated as a kind of performance poetry. In the 1960s and 70s, spoken word artists like Gil Scott-Heron began performing their poems over live or synthesized drumbeats, a practice that sparked all of modern hip hop. Even earlier, the beat poets of the 1950s sometimes employed drums in their readings.

Some of the most famous historical poems have been turned into movies or inspired episodes of television shows. Beowulf, for example, is an Anglo-Saxon epic poem that has spawned at least 8 film adaptations, most recently a 2007 animated film starring Angelina Jolie and Anthony Hopkins. Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven has also inspired many pop culture spinoffs with its famous line, "Nevermore."

VI. Related Terms (with examples)

Verse

Nearly all poems are written in verse - that is, they have line breaks and meter (rhythm). But verse is also used in other areas of literature. For example, Shakespeare's characters often speak in verse. Their dialogue is separated into rhythmic lines just like a song, but they are supposed to be speaking normally.

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Poetry: Definition and Examples | LiteraryTerms.net

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Clear definition and great examples of Poetry. This article will show you the importance of Poetry and how to use it. Poetry is a type of literature based on the interplay of words and rhythm. It often employs rhyme and meter

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"Poetry is a form of literature that follows specific forms to create a rhythm and/or rhyme scheme"
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/poetry

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Poetry is a form of literature that follows specific forms to create a rhythm and/or rhyme scheme. Without those elements we have the poetic form known as "free verse," but it retains an elevated language that still makes it poetry.

The noun poetry goes all the way back to the Latin poesis, meaning both "poetry" and "making." It usually refers to the specific genre of poetic works, a wide variety of styles tied together by the structured use of the language, but is also used to describe any especially beautiful language. The French writer Voltaire once said, " Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls."

1. literature in metrical form

2. any communication resembling poetry in beauty or the evocation of feeling

type of:

expressive style, style

a way of expressing something (in language or art or music etc.) that is characteristic of a particular person or group of people or period

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Poetry is a form of literature that follows specific forms to create a rhythm and/or rhyme scheme. Without those elements we have the poetic form known as "free verse," but it retains an elevated language that still makes it poetry.

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Poetry (derived from the Greek poiesis, "making"), also called verse,[note 1] is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic[1][2][3] qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry

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Poetry (derived from the Greek , "making"), also called verse, is a 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. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle.

Poetry has a long and varied history, evolving differentially across the globe. It dates back at least to prehistoric times with hunting poetry in Africa and to panegyric and elegiac court poetry of the empires of the Nile, Niger, and Volta River valleys. Some of the earliest written poetry in Africa occurs among the Pyramid Texts written during the 25th century BCE. The earliest surviving Western Asian epic poetry, the Epic of Gilgamesh, was written in Sumerian.

Early poems in the Eurasian continent evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing, as well as religious hymns (the Sanskrit , the Zoroastrian Gathas, the Hurrian songs, and the Hebrew ); or from a need to retell oral epics, as with the Egyptian Story of Sinuhe, the Indian epic poetry, and the Homeric epics, the and the . Ancient Greek attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle's Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song, and comedy. Later attempts concentrated on features such as repetition, verse form, and rhyme, and emphasized the aesthetics which distinguish poetry from more objectively-informative prosaic writing.

Some poetry types are unique to particular cultures and genres and respond to characteristics of the language in which the poet writes. Readers accustomed to identifying poetry with Dante, Goethe, Mickiewicz, or 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. Much modern poetry reflects a critique of poetic tradition, testing the principle of euphony itself or altogether forgoing rhyme or set rhythm. In an increasingly globalized world, poets often adapt forms, styles, and techniques from diverse cultures and languages. Poets have contributed to the evolution of the linguistic, expressive, and utilitarian qualities of their languages.

A Western cultural tradition (extending at least from Homer to Rilke) associates the production of poetry with inspiration - often by a Muse (either classical or contemporary).

In many poems, the lyrics are spoken by a character, who is called the speaker. This concept differentiates the speaker (character) from the poet (author), which is usually an important distinction: for example, if the poem runs "I killed a man in Reno", it is the speaker who is the murderer, not the poet himself.

Some scholars believe that the art of poetry may predate literacy, and developed from folk epics and other oral genres. Others, however, suggest that poetry did not necessarily predate writing.

The oldest surviving epic poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, dates from the 3rd millenniumBCE in Sumer (in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq), and was written in cuneiform script on clay tablets and, later, on papyrus. The Istanbul tablet #2461, dating to c.2000BCE, describes an annual rite in which the king symbolically married and mated with the goddess Inanna to ensure fertility and prosperity; some have labelled it the world's oldest love poem. An example of Egyptian epic poetry is The Story of Sinuhe (c. 1800 BCE).

Other ancient epics includes the Greek and the ; the Persian Avestan books (the ); the Roman national epic, Virgil's (written between 29 and 19 BCE); and the Indian epics, the and the Mahabharata. Epic poetry appears to have been composed in poetic form as an aid to memorization and oral transmission in ancient societies.

Other forms of poetry, including such ancient collections of religious hymns as the Indian Sanskrit-language , the Avestan Gathas, the Hurrian songs, and the Hebrew , possibly developed directly from folk songs. The earliest entries in the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry, the Classic of Poetry ( Shijing), were initially lyrics. The Shijing, with its collection of poems and folk songs, was heavily valued by the philosopher Confucius and is considered to be one of the official Confucian classics. His remarks on the subject have become an invaluable source in ancient music theory.

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. Some ancient societies, such as China's through the Shijing, developed canons of poetic works that had ritual as well as aesthetic importance. 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.

Until recently, the earliest examples of stressed poetry had been thought to be works composed by Romanos the Melodist ( fl. 6th century CE). In 2021, however, Tim Whitmarsh wrote that an inscribed Greek poem that he had been studying predated Romanos' stressed poetry.

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

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

Classical thinkers in the West employed classification as a way to define and assess the quality of poetry. Notably, the existing fragments of Aristotle's Poetics describe three genres of poetry-the epic, the comic, and the tragic-and develop rules to distinguish the highest-quality poetry in each genre, based on the perceived underlying purposes of the genre. Later aestheticians identified three major genres: epic poetry, lyric poetry, and dramatic poetry, treating comedy and tragedy as subgenres of dramatic poetry.

Aristotle's work was influential throughout the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age, as well as in Europe during the Renaissance. Later poets and aestheticians often distinguished poetry from, and defined it in opposition to prose, which they generally understood as writing with a proclivity to logical explication and a linear narrative structure.

This does not imply that poetry is illogical or lacks narration, but rather that poetry is an attempt to render the beautiful or sublime without the burden of engaging the logical or narrative thought-process. English Romantic poet John Keats termed this escape from logic " negative capability". This "romantic" approach views form as a key element of successful poetry because form is abstract and distinct from the underlying notional logic. This approach remained influential into the 20th century.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, there was also substantially more interaction among the various poetic traditions, in part due to the spread of European colonialism and the attendant rise in global trade. In addition to a boom in translation, during the Romantic period numerous ancient works were rediscovered.

Some 20th-century literary theorists rely less on the ostensible opposition of prose and poetry, instead focusing on the poet as simply one who creates using language, and poetry as what the poet creates. 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. Yet other modernists challenge the very attempt to define poetry as misguided.

The rejection of traditional forms and structures for poetry that began in the first half of the 20th century coincided with a questioning of the purpose and meaning of traditional definitions of poetry and of distinctions between poetry and prose, particularly given examples of poetic prose and prosaic poetry. Numerous modernist poets have written in non-traditional forms or in what traditionally would have been considered prose, although their writing was generally infused with poetic diction and often with rhythm and tone established by non-metrical means. While there was a substantial formalist reaction within the modernist schools to the breakdown of structure, this reaction focused as much on the development of new formal structures and syntheses as on the revival of older forms and structures.

Postmodernism goes beyond modernism's emphasis on the creative role of the poet, to emphasize the role of the reader of a text ( hermeneutics), and to highlight the complex cultural web within which a poem is read. Today, throughout the world, poetry often incorporates poetic form and diction from other cultures and from the past, further confounding attempts at definition and classification that once made sense within a tradition such as the Western canon.

The early 21st-century poetic tradition appears to continue to strongly orient itself to earlier precursor poetic traditions such as those initiated by Whitman, Emerson, and Wordsworth. The literary critic Geoffrey Hartman (1929-2016) used the phrase "the anxiety of demand" to describe the contemporary response to older poetic traditions as "being fearful that the fact no longer has a form", building on a trope introduced by Emerson. Emerson had maintained that in the debate concerning poetic structure where either "form" or "fact" could predominate, that one need simply "Ask the fact for the form." This has been challenged at various levels by other literary scholars such as Harold Bloom (1930-2019), who has stated: "The generation of poets who stand together now, mature and ready to write the major American verse of the twenty-first century, may yet be seen as what Stevens called 'a great shadow's last embellishment,' the shadow being Emerson's."

Prosody is the study of the meter, rhythm, and intonation of a poem. Rhythm and meter are different, although closely related. 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. Prosody also may be used more specifically to refer to the scanning of poetic lines to show meter.

Metrical rhythm generally involves precise arrangements of stresses or syllables into repeated patterns called feet within a line. In Modern English verse the pattern of stresses primarily differentiate feet, so rhythm based on meter in Modern English is most often founded on the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables (alone or elided). In the classical languages, on the other hand, while the metrical units are similar, vowel length rather than stresses define the meter. Old English poetry used a metrical pattern involving varied numbers of syllables but a fixed number of strong stresses in each line.

The chief device of ancient Hebrew Biblical poetry, including many of the psalms, was parallelism, a rhetorical structure in which successive lines reflected each other in grammatical structure, sound structure, notional content, or all three. Parallelism lent itself to antiphonal or call-and-response performance, which could also be reinforced by intonation. Thus, Biblical poetry relies much less on metrical feet to create rhythm, but instead creates rhythm based on much larger sound units of lines, phrases and sentences. Some classical poetry forms, such as Venpa of the Tamil language, had rigid grammars (to the point that they could be expressed as a context-free grammar) which ensured a rhythm.

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. Certain forms of poetry placed constraints on which syllables were required to be level and which oblique.

The formal patterns of meter used in Modern English verse to create rhythm no longer dominate contemporary English poetry. In the case of free verse, rhythm is often organized based on looser units of cadence rather than a regular meter. Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams are three notable poets who reject the idea that regular accentual meter is critical to English poetry. Jeffers experimented with sprung rhythm as an alternative to accentual rhythm.

In the Western poetic tradition, meters are customarily grouped according to a characteristic metrical foot and the number of feet per line. The number of metrical feet in a line are described using Greek terminology: tetrameter for four feet and hexameter for six feet, for example. Thus, " iambic pentameter" is a meter comprising five feet per line, in which the predominant kind of foot is the " iamb". This metric system originated in ancient Greek poetry, and was used by poets such as Pindar and Sappho, and by the great tragedians of Athens. Similarly, " dactylic hexameter", comprises six feet per line, of which the dominant kind of foot is the " dactyl". Dactylic hexameter was the traditional meter of Greek epic poetry, the earliest extant examples of which are the works of Homer and Hesiod. Iambic pentameter and dactylic hexameter were later used by a number of poets, including William Shakespeare and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, respectively. The most common metrical feet in English are:

iamb - one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (e.g. des-cribe, in-clude, re-tract)

trochee-one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable (e.g. pic-ture, flow-er)

dactyl - one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables (e.g. an-no-tate, sim-i-lar)

anapaest-two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable (e.g. com-pre-hend)

spondee-two stressed syllables together (e.g. heart-beat, four-teen)

pyrrhic-two unstressed syllables together (rare, usually used to end dactylic hexameter)

There are a wide range of names for other types of feet, right up to a choriamb, a four syllable metric foot with a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables and closing with a stressed syllable. The choriamb is derived from some ancient Greek and Latin poetry. Languages which use vowel length or intonation rather than or in addition to syllabic accents in determining meter, such as Ottoman Turkish or Vedic, often have concepts similar to the iamb and dactyl to describe common combinations of long and short sounds.

Each of these types of feet has a certain "feel," whether alone or in combination with other feet. The iamb, for example, is the most natural form of rhythm in the English language, and generally produces a subtle but stable verse. Scanning meter can often show the basic or fundamental pattern underlying a verse, but does not show the varying degrees of stress, as well as the differing pitches and lengths of syllables.

There is debate over how useful a multiplicity of different "feet" is in describing meter. For example, Robert Pinsky has argued that while dactyls are important in classical verse, English dactylic verse uses dactyls very irregularly and can be better described based on patterns of iambs and anapests, feet which he considers natural to the language. Actual rhythm is significantly more complex than the basic scanned meter described above, and many scholars have sought to develop systems that would scan such complexity. Vladimir Nabokov noted that overlaid on top of the regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of verse was a separate pattern of accents resulting from the natural pitch of the spoken words, and suggested that the term "scud" be used to distinguish an unaccented stress from an accented stress.

Different traditions and genres of poetry tend to use different meters, ranging from the Shakespearean iambic pentameter and the Homeric dactylic hexameter to the anapestic tetrameter used in many nursery rhymes. However, a number of variations to the established meter are common, both to provide emphasis or attention to a given foot or line and to avoid boring repetition. For example, the stress in a foot may be inverted, a caesura (or pause) may be added (sometimes in place of a foot or stress), or the final foot in a line may be given a feminine ending to soften it or be replaced by a spondee to emphasize it and create a hard stop. Some patterns (such as iambic pentameter) tend to be fairly regular, while other patterns, such as dactylic hexameter, tend to be highly irregular. Regularity can vary between language. In addition, different patterns often develop distinctively in different languages, so that, for example, iambic tetrameter in Russian will generally reflect a regularity in the use of accents to reinforce the meter, which does not occur, or occurs to a much lesser extent, in English.

Some common metrical patterns, with notable examples of poets and poems who use them, include:

Rhyme, alliteration, assonance

Rhyme, alliteration, assonance and consonance are ways of creating repetitive patterns of sound. They may be used as an independent structural element in a poem, to reinforce rhythmic patterns, or as an ornamental element. They can also carry a meaning separate from the repetitive sound patterns created. For example, Chaucer used heavy alliteration to mock Old English verse and to paint a character as archaic.

Rhyme consists of identical ("hard-rhyme") or similar ("soft-rhyme") sounds placed at the ends of lines or at locations within lines (" internal rhyme"). Languages vary in the richness of their rhyming structures; Italian, for example, has a rich rhyming structure permitting maintenance of a limited set of rhymes throughout a lengthy poem. The richness results from word endings that follow regular forms. English, with its irregular word endings adopted from other languages, is less rich in rhyme. The degree of richness of a language's rhyming structures plays a substantial role in determining what poetic forms are commonly used in that language.

Alliteration is the repetition of letters or letter-sounds at the beginning of two or more words immediately succeeding each other, or at short intervals; or the recurrence of the same letter in accented parts of words. Alliteration and assonance played a key role in structuring early Germanic, Norse and Old English forms of poetry. The alliterative patterns of early Germanic poetry interweave meter and alliteration as a key part of their structure, so that the metrical pattern determines when the listener expects instances of alliteration to occur. This can be compared to an ornamental use of alliteration in most Modern European poetry, where alliterative patterns are not formal or carried through full stanzas. Alliteration is particularly useful in languages with less rich rhyming structures.

Assonance, where the use of similar vowel sounds within a word rather than similar sounds at the beginning or end of a word, was widely used in skaldic poetry but goes back to the Homeric epic. Because verbs carry much of the pitch in the English language, assonance can loosely evoke the tonal elements of Chinese poetry and so is useful in translating Chinese poetry. Consonance occurs where a consonant sound is repeated throughout a sentence without putting the sound only at the front of a word. Consonance provokes a more subtle effect than alliteration and so is less useful as a structural element.

In many languages, including modern European languages and Arabic, poets use rhyme in set patterns as a structural element for specific poetic forms, such as ballads, sonnets and rhyming couplets. However, the use of structural rhyme is not universal even within the European tradition. Much modern poetry avoids traditional rhyme schemes. Classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use rhyme. Rhyme entered European poetry in the High Middle Ages, in part under the influence of the Arabic language in Al Andalus (modern Spain). Arabic language poets used rhyme extensively from the first development of literary Arabic in the sixth century, as in their long, rhyming qasidas. Some rhyming schemes have become associated with a specific language, culture or period, while other rhyming schemes have achieved use across languages, cultures or time periods. Some forms of poetry carry a consistent and well-defined rhyming scheme, such as the chant royal or the rubaiyat, while other poetic forms have variable rhyme schemes.

Most rhyme schemes are described using letters that correspond to sets of rhymes, so if the first, second and fourth lines of a quatrain rhyme with each other and the third line do not rhyme, the quatrain is said to have an "aa-ba" rhyme scheme. This rhyme scheme is the one used, for example, in the rubaiyat form. Similarly, an "a-bb-a" quatrain (what is known as " enclosed rhyme") is used in such forms as the Petrarchan sonnet. Some types of more complicated rhyming schemes have developed names of their own, separate from the "a-bc" convention, such as the ottava rima and terza rima. The types and use of differing rhyming schemes are discussed further in the main article.

Poetic form is more flexible in modernist and post-modernist poetry and continues to be less structured than in previous literary eras. Many modern poets eschew recognizable structures or forms and write in free verse. Free verse is, however, not "formless" but composed of a series of more subtle, more flexible prosodic elements. Thus poetry remains, in all its styles, distinguished from prose by form; some regard for basic formal structures of poetry will be found in all varieties of free verse, however much such structures may appear to have been ignored. Similarly, in the best poetry written in classic styles there will be departures from strict form for emphasis or effect.

Among major structural elements used in poetry are the line, the stanza or verse paragraph, and larger combinations of stanzas or lines such as cantos. Also sometimes used are broader visual presentations of words and calligraphy. These basic units of poetic form are often combined into larger structures, called poetic forms or poetic modes (see the following section), as in the sonnet.

Poetry is often separated into lines on a page, in a process known as lineation. These lines may be based on the number of metrical feet or may emphasize a rhyming pattern at the ends of lines. Lines may serve other functions, particularly where the poem is not written in a formal metrical pattern. Lines can separate, compare or contrast thoughts expressed in different units, or can highlight a change in tone. See the article on line breaks for information about the division between lines.

Lines of poems are often organized into stanzas, which are denominated by the number of lines included. Thus a collection of two lines is a couplet (or distich), three lines a triplet (or tercet), four lines a quatrain, and so on. These lines may or may not relate to each other by rhyme or rhythm. For example, a couplet may be two lines with identical meters which rhyme or two lines held together by a common meter alone.

Other poems may be organized into verse paragraphs, in which regular rhymes with established rhythms are not used, but the poetic tone is instead established by a collection of rhythms, alliterations, and rhymes established in paragraph form. Many medieval poems were written in verse paragraphs, even where regular rhymes and rhythms were used.

In many forms of poetry, stanzas are interlocking, so that the rhyming scheme or other structural elements of one stanza determine those of succeeding stanzas. Examples of such interlocking stanzas include, for example, the ghazal and the villanelle, where a refrain (or, in the case of the villanelle, refrains) is established in the first stanza which then repeats in subsequent stanzas. Related to the use of interlocking stanzas is their use to separate thematic parts of a poem. For example, the strophe, antistrophe and epode of the ode form are often separated into one or more stanzas.

In some cases, particularly lengthier formal poetry such as some forms of epic poetry, stanzas themselves are constructed according to strict rules and then combined. In skaldic poetry, the dróttkvætt stanza had eight lines, each having three "lifts" produced with alliteration or assonance. In addition to two or three alliterations, the odd-numbered lines had partial rhyme of consonants with dissimilar vowels, not necessarily at the beginning of the word; the even lines contained internal rhyme in set syllables (not necessarily at the end of the word). Each half-line had exactly six syllables, and each line ended in a trochee. The arrangement of dróttkvætts followed far less rigid rules than the construction of the individual dróttkvætts.

Even before the advent of printing, the visual appearance of poetry often added meaning or depth. Acrostic poems conveyed meanings in the initial letters of lines or in letters at other specific places in a poem. In Arabic, Hebrew and Chinese poetry, the visual presentation of finely calligraphed poems has played an important part in the overall effect of many poems.

With the advent of printing, poets gained greater control over the mass-produced visual presentations of their work. Visual elements have become an important part of the poet's toolbox, and many poets have sought to use visual presentation for a wide range of purposes. Some Modernist poets have made the placement of individual lines or groups of lines on the page an integral part of the poem's composition. At times, this complements the poem's rhythm through visual caesuras of various lengths, or creates juxtapositions so as to accentuate meaning, ambiguity or irony, or simply to create an aesthetically pleasing form. In its most extreme form, this can lead to concrete poetry or asemic writing.

Poetic diction treats the manner in which language is used, and refers not only to the sound but also to the underlying meaning and its interaction with sound and form. Many languages and poetic forms have very specific poetic dictions, to the point where distinct grammars and dialects are used specifically for poetry. Registers in poetry can range from strict employment of ordinary speech patterns, as favoured in much late-20th-century prosody, through to highly ornate uses of language, as in medieval and Renaissance poetry.

Poetic diction can include rhetorical devices such as simile and metaphor, as well as tones of voice, such as irony. Aristotle wrote in the that "the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor." Since the rise of Modernism, some poets have opted for a poetic diction that de-emphasizes rhetorical devices, attempting instead the direct presentation of things and experiences and the exploration of tone. On the other hand, Surrealists have pushed rhetorical devices to their limits, making frequent use of catachresis.

Allegorical stories are central to the poetic diction of many cultures, and were prominent in the West during classical times, the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Aesop's Fables, repeatedly rendered in both verse and prose since first being recorded about 500 BCE, are perhaps the richest single source of allegorical poetry through the ages. Other notables examples include the Roman de la Rose, a 13th-century French poem, William Langland's Piers Ploughman in the 14th century, and Jean de la Fontaine's Fables (influenced by Aesop's) in the 17th century. Rather than being fully allegorical, however, a poem may contain symbols or allusions that deepen the meaning or effect of its words without constructing a full allegory.

Another element of poetic diction can be the use of vivid imagery for effect. The juxtaposition of unexpected or impossible images is, for example, a particularly strong element in surrealist poetry and haiku. Vivid images are often endowed with symbolism or metaphor. Many poetic dictions use repetitive phrases for effect, either a short phrase (such as Homer's "rosy-fingered dawn" or "the wine-dark sea") or a longer refrain. Such repetition can add a somber tone to a poem, or can be laced with irony as the context of the words changes.

Specific poetic forms have been developed by many cultures. In more developed, closed or "received" poetic forms, the rhyming scheme, meter and other elements of a poem are based on sets of rules, ranging from the relatively loose rules that govern the construction of an elegy to the highly formalized structure of the ghazal or villanelle. Described below are some common forms of poetry widely used across a number of languages. Additional forms of poetry may be found in the discussions of the poetry of particular cultures or periods and in the glossary.

Among the most common forms of poetry, popular from the Late Middle Ages on, is the sonnet, which by the 13th century had become standardized as fourteen lines following a set rhyme scheme and logical structure. By the 14th century and the Italian Renaissance, the form had further crystallized under the pen of Petrarch, whose sonnets were translated in the 16th century by Sir Thomas Wyatt, who is credited with introducing the sonnet form into English literature. A traditional Italian or Petrarchan sonnet follows the rhyme scheme ABBA, ABBA, CDECDE, though some variation, perhaps the most common being CDCDCD, especially within the final six lines (or sestet), is common. The English (or Shakespearean) sonnet follows the rhyme scheme ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG, introducing a third quatrain (grouping of four lines), a final couplet, and a greater amount of variety in rhyme than is usually found in its Italian predecessors. By convention, sonnets in English typically use iambic pentameter, while in the Romance languages, the hendecasyllable and Alexandrine are the most widely used meters.

Sonnets of all types often make use of a volta, or "turn," a point in the poem at which an idea is turned on its head, a question is answered (or introduced), or the subject matter is further complicated. This volta can often take the form of a "but" statement contradicting or complicating the content of the earlier lines. In the Petrarchan sonnet, the turn tends to fall around the division between the first two quatrains and the sestet, while English sonnets usually place it at or near the beginning of the closing couplet.

Sonnets are particularly associated with high poetic diction, vivid imagery, and romantic love, largely due to the influence of Petrarch as well as of early English practitioners such as Edmund Spenser (who gave his name to the Spenserian sonnet), Michael Drayton, and Shakespeare, whose sonnets are among the most famous in English poetry, with twenty being included in the Oxford Book of English Verse. However, the twists and turns associated with the volta allow for a logical flexibility applicable to many subjects. Poets from the earliest centuries of the sonnet to the present have used the form to address topics related to politics ( John Milton, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Claude McKay), theology ( John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins), war ( Wilfred Owen, e.e. cummings), and gender and sexuality ( Carol Ann Duffy). Further, postmodern authors such as Ted Berrigan and John Berryman have challenged the traditional definitions of the sonnet form, rendering entire sequences of "sonnets" that often lack rhyme, a clear logical progression, or even a consistent count of fourteen lines.

Shi ( simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: ; Wade-Giles: ) Is the main type of Classical Chinese poetry. Within this form of poetry the most important variations are "folk song" styled verse (), "old style" verse (), "modern style" verse (). In all cases, rhyming is obligatory. The Yuefu is a folk ballad or a poem written in the folk ballad style, and the number of lines and the length of the lines could be irregular. For the other variations of shi poetry, generally either a four line (quatrain, or ) or else an eight-line poem is normal; either way with the even numbered lines rhyming. The line length is scanned by an according number of characters (according to the convention that one character equals one syllable), and are predominantly either five or seven characters long, with a caesura before the final three syllables. The lines are generally end-stopped, considered as a series of couplets, and exhibit verbal parallelism as a key poetic device. The "old style" verse ( Gushi) is less formally strict than the jintishi, or regulated verse, which, despite the name "new style" verse actually had its theoretical basis laid as far back as Shen Yue (441-513 CE), although not considered to have reached its full development until the time of Chen Zi'ang (661-702 CE). A good example of a poet known for his Gushi poems is Li Bai (701-762 CE). Among its other rules, the jintishi rules regulate the tonal variations within a poem, including the use of set patterns of the four tones of Middle Chinese. The basic form of jintishi (sushi) has eight lines in four couplets, with parallelism between the lines in the second and third couplets. The couplets with parallel lines contain contrasting content but an identical grammatical relationship between words. Jintishi often have a rich poetic diction, full of allusion, and can have a wide range of subject, including history and politics. One of the masters of the form was Du Fu (712-770 CE), who wrote during the Tang Dynasty (8th century).

The villanelle is a nineteen-line poem made up of five triplets with a closing quatrain; the poem is characterized by having two refrains, initially used in the first and third lines of the first stanza, and then alternately used at the close of each subsequent stanza until the final quatrain, which is concluded by the two refrains. The remaining lines of the poem have an a-b alternating rhyme. The villanelle has been used regularly in the English language since the late 19th century by such poets as Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop.

A limerick is a poem that consists of five lines and is often humorous. Rhythm is very important in limericks for the first, second and fifth lines must have seven to ten syllables. However, the third and fourth lines only need five to seven. Lines 1, 2 and 5 rhyme with each other, and lines 3 and 4 rhyme with each other. Practitioners of the limerick included Edward Lear, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson.

Tanka is a form of unrhymed Japanese poetry, with five sections totalling 31 (phonological units identical to morae), structured in a 5-7-5-7-7 pattern. There is generally a shift in tone and subject matter between the upper 5-7-5 phrase and the lower 7-7 phrase. Tanka were written as early as the Asuka period by such poets as Kakinomoto no Hitomaro ( fl. late 7th century), at a time when Japan was emerging from a period where much of its poetry followed Chinese form. Tanka was originally the shorter form of Japanese formal poetry (which was generally referred to as " waka"), and was used more heavily to explore personal rather than public themes. By the tenth century, tanka had become the dominant form of Japanese poetry, to the point where the originally general term waka ("Japanese poetry") came to be used exclusively for tanka. Tanka are still widely written today.

Haiku is a popular form of unrhymed Japanese poetry, which evolved in the 17th century from the , or opening verse of a renku. Generally written in a single vertical line, the haiku contains three sections totalling 17 on ( morae), structured in a 5-7-5 pattern. Traditionally, haiku contain a kireji, or cutting word, usually placed at the end of one of the poem's three sections, and a kigo, or season-word. The most famous exponent of the haiku was Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694). An example of his writing:

fuji no kaze ya oogi ni nosete Edo miyage

the wind of Mt. Fuji

I've brought on my fan!

a gift from Edo

The khlong (, ) is among the oldest Thai poetic forms. This is reflected in its requirements on the tone markings of certain syllables, which must be marked with mai ek (, Thai pronunciation: , ) or mai tho (, , ). This was likely derived from when the Thai language had three tones (as opposed to today's five, a split which occurred during the Ayutthaya Kingdom period), two of which corresponded directly to the aforementioned marks. It is usually regarded as an advanced and sophisticated poetic form.

In khlong, a stanza ( bot, , Thai pronunciation: ) has a number of lines ( bat, , Thai pronunciation: , from Pali and Sanskrit ), depending on the type. The bat are subdivided into two wak (, Thai pronunciation: , from Sanskrit varga). The first wak has five syllables, the second has a variable number, also depending on the type, and may be optional. The type of khlong is named by the number of bat in a stanza; it may also be divided into two main types: khlong suphap (, [kʰlōːŋ sù.pʰâːp]) and khlong dan (, ). The two differ in the number of syllables in the second wak of the final bat and inter-stanza rhyming rules.

The khlong si suphap (โคลงสี่สุภาพ , [kʰlōːŋ sìː sù.pʰâːp]) is the most common form still currently employed. It has four bat per stanza ( si translates as four). The first wak of each bat has five syllables. The second wak has two or four syllables in the first and third bat, two syllables in the second, and four syllables in the fourth. Mai ek is required for seven syllables and Mai tho is required for four, as shown below. " Dead word" syllables are allowed in place of syllables which require mai ek, and changing the spelling of words to satisfy the criteria is usually acceptable.

Odes were first developed by poets writing in ancient Greek, such as Pindar, and Latin, such as Horace. Forms of odes appear in many of the cultures that were influenced by the Greeks and Latins. The ode generally has three parts: a strophe, an antistrophe, and an epode. The strophe and the antistrophe of the ode possess similar metrical structures and, depending on the tradition, similar rhyme structures. In contrast, the epode is written with a different scheme and structure. Odes have a formal poetic diction and generally deal with a serious subject. The strophe and antistrophe look at the subject from different, often conflicting, perspectives, with the epode moving to a higher level to either view or resolve the underlying issues. Odes are often intended to be recited or sung by two choruses (or individuals), with the first reciting the strophe, the second the antistrophe, and both together the epode. Over time, differing forms for odes have developed with considerable variations in form and structure, but generally showing the original influence of the Pindaric or Horatian ode. One non-Western form which resembles the ode is the qasida in Arabic poetry.

The (also , , , or ) is a form of poetry common in Arabic, Bengali, Persian and Urdu. In classic form, the has from five to fifteen rhyming couplets that share a refrain at the end of the second line. This refrain may be of one or several syllables and is preceded by a rhyme. Each line has an identical meter. The often reflects on a theme of unattainable love or divinity.

As with other forms with a long history in many languages, many variations have been developed, including forms with a quasi-musical poetic diction in Urdu. Ghazals have a classical affinity with Sufism, and a number of major Sufi religious works are written in ghazal form. The relatively steady meter and the use of the refrain produce an incantatory effect, which complements Sufi mystical themes well. Among the masters of the form is Rumi, a 13th-century Persian poet. One of the most famous poet in this type of poetry is Hafez, whose poems often include the theme of exposing hypocrisy. His life and poems have been the subject of much analysis, commentary and interpretation, influencing post-fourteenth century Persian writing more than any other author. The West-östlicher Diwan of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a collection of lyrical poems, is inspired by the Persian poet Hafez.

In addition to specific forms of poems, poetry is often thought of in terms of different genres and subgenres. A poetic genre is generally a tradition or classification of poetry based on the subject matter, style, or other broader literary characteristics. Some commentators view genres as natural forms of literature. Others view the study of genres as the study of how different works relate and refer to other works.

Narrative poetry is a genre of poetry that tells a story. Broadly it subsumes epic poetry, but the term "narrative poetry" is often reserved for smaller works, generally with more appeal to human interest. Narrative poetry may be the oldest type of poetry. Many scholars of Homer have concluded that his and were composed of compilations of shorter narrative poems that related individual episodes. Much narrative poetry-such as Scottish and English ballads, and Baltic and Slavic heroic poems-is performance poetry with roots in a preliterate oral tradition. It has been speculated that some features that distinguish poetry from prose, such as meter, alliteration and kennings, once served as memory aids for bards who recited traditional tales.

Lyric poetry is a genre that, unlike epic and dramatic poetry, does not attempt to tell a story but instead is of a more personal nature. Poems in this genre tend to be shorter, melodic, and contemplative. Rather than depicting characters and actions, it portrays the poet's own feelings, states of mind, and perceptions. Notable poets in this genre include Christine de Pizan, John Donne, Charles Baudelaire, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Antonio Machado, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Epic poetry is a genre of poetry, and a major form of narrative literature. This genre is often defined as lengthy poems concerning events of a heroic or important nature to the culture of the time. It recounts, in a continuous narrative, the life and works of a heroic or mythological person or group of persons. Examples of epic poems are Homer's and , Virgil's Aeneid, the Nibelungenlied, Luís de Camões' Os Lusíadas, the Cantar de Mio Cid, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, Lönnrot's , Valmiki's , Ferdowsi's , Nizami (or Nezami)'s Khamse (Five Books), and the Epic of King Gesar. While the composition of epic poetry, and of long poems generally, became less common in the west after the early 20th century, some notable epics have continued to be written. by Ezra Pound, Helen in Egypt by H.D., and by William Carlos Williams are examples of modern epics. Derek Walcott won a Nobel prize in 1992 to a great extent on the basis of his epic, .

Poetry can be a powerful vehicle for satire. The Romans had a strong tradition of satirical poetry, often written for political purposes. A notable example is the Roman poet Juvenal's satires.

The same is true of the English satirical tradition. John Dryden (a Tory), the first Poet Laureate, produced in 1682 Mac Flecknoe, subtitled "A Satire on the True Blue Protestant Poet, T.S." (a reference to Thomas Shadwell). Satirical poets outside England include Poland's Ignacy Krasicki, Azerbaijan's Sabir, Portugal's Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage, and Korea's Kim Kirim, especially noted for his .

An elegy is a mournful, melancholy or plaintive poem, especially a lament for the dead or a funeral song. The term "elegy," which originally denoted a type of poetic meter ( elegiac meter), commonly describes a poem of mourning. An elegy may also reflect something that seems to the author to be strange or mysterious. The elegy, as a reflection on a death, on a sorrow more generally, or on something mysterious, may be classified as a form of lyric poetry.

The fable is an ancient literary genre, often (though not invariably) set in verse. It is a succinct story that features anthropomorphised animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that illustrate a moral lesson (a " moral"). Verse fables have used a variety of meter and rhyme patterns.

Notable verse fabulists have included Aesop, Vishnu Sarma, Phaedrus, Marie de France, Robert Henryson, Biernat of Lublin, Jean de La Fontaine, Ignacy Krasicki, Félix María de Samaniego, Tomás de Iriarte, Ivan Krylov and Ambrose Bierce.

Dramatic poetry is drama written in verse to be spoken or sung, and appears in varying, sometimes related forms in many cultures. Greek tragedy in verse dates to the 6th century B.C., and may have been an influence on the development of Sanskrit drama, just as Indian drama in turn appears to have influenced the development of the verse dramas in China, forerunners of Chinese Opera. East Asian verse dramas also include Japanese Noh. Examples of dramatic poetry in Persian literature include Nizami's two famous dramatic works, Layla and Majnun and Khosrow and Shirin, Ferdowsi's tragedies such as Rostam and Sohrab, Rumi's , Gorgani's tragedy of Vis and Ramin, and Vahshi's tragedy of . American poets of 20th century revive dramatic poetry, including Ezra Pound in " Sestina: Altaforte," T.S. Eliot with " The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,".

Speculative poetry, also known as fantastic poetry (of which weird or macabre poetry is a major sub-classification), is a poetic genre which deals thematically with subjects which are "beyond reality", whether via extrapolation as in science fiction or via weird and horrific themes as in horror fiction. Such poetry appears regularly in modern science fiction and horror fiction magazines. Edgar Allan Poe is sometimes seen as the "father of speculative poetry". Poe's most remarkable achievement in the genre was his anticipation, by three-quarters of a century, of the Big Bang theory of the universe's origin, in his then much-derided 1848 essay (which, due to its very speculative nature, he termed a " prose poem"), Eureka: A Prose Poem.

Prose poetry is a hybrid genre that shows attributes of both prose and poetry. It may be indistinguishable from the micro-story ( a.k.a. the " short short story", " flash fiction"). While some examples of earlier prose strike modern readers as poetic, prose poetry is commonly regarded as having originated in 19th-century France, where its practitioners included Aloysius Bertrand, Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Arthur Rimbaud. Since the late 1980s especially, prose poetry has gained increasing popularity, with entire journals, such as The Prose Poem: An International Journal, Contemporary Haibun Online, and Haibun Today devoted to that genre and its hybrids. Latin American poets of the 20th century who wrote prose poems include Octavio Paz and Alejandra Pizarnik.

Light poetry, or light verse, is poetry that attempts to be humorous. Poems considered "light" are usually brief, and can be on a frivolous or serious subject, and often feature word play, including puns, adventurous rhyme and heavy alliteration. Although a few free verse poets have excelled at light verse outside the formal verse tradition, light verse in English usually obeys at least some formal conventions. Common forms include the limerick, the clerihew, and the double dactyl.

While light poetry is sometimes condemned as doggerel, or thought of as poetry composed casually, humor often makes a serious point in a subtle or subversive way. Many of the most renowned "serious" poets have also excelled at light verse. Notable writers of light poetry include Lewis Carroll, Ogden Nash, X. J. Kennedy, Willard R. Espy, Shel Silverstein, and Wendy Cope.

Slam poetry as a genre originated in 1986 in Chicago, Illinois, when Marc Kelly Smith organized the first slam. Slam performers comment emotively, aloud before an audience, on personal, social, or other matters. Slam focuses on the aesthetics of word play, intonation, and voice inflection. Slam poetry is often competitive, at dedicated " poetry slam" contests.

Performance poetry, similar to slam in that it occurs before an audience, is a genre of poetry that may fuse a variety of disciplines in a performance of a text, such as dance, music, and other aspects of performance art.

The term was popularized by the avante garde movements in the 1950s and regard spontaneous, site-specific performances. Language happenings, termed from the poetics collective OBJECT:PARADISE in 2018, are events which focus less on poetry as a prescriptive literary genre, but more as a descriptive linguistic act and performance, often incorporating broader forms of performance art while poetry is read or created in that moment.

1. ^ "Poetry". Oxford Dictionaries. Oxford University Press. 2013. Archived from the original on 18 June 2013. poetry [...] Literary work in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of distinctive style and rhythm; poems collectively or as a genre of literature.

2. ^ "Poetry". Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster, Inc. 2013. poetry [...] 2 : writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm

3. ^ "Poetry". Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com, LLC. 2013. poetry [...] 1 the art of rhythmical composition, written or spoken, for exciting pleasure by beautiful, imaginative, or elevated thoughts.

4. Ruth Finnegan, ^ Oral Literature in Africa, Open Book Publishers, 2012.

5. ^ Goody, Jack (1987). The Interface Between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge University Press. p. 78. ISBN 978-0-521-33794-6. [...] poetry, tales, recitations of various kinds existed long before writing was introduced and these oral forms continued in modified 'oral' forms, even after the establishment of a written literature.

6. ^ The Epic of Gilgamesh. Translated by Sanders, N. K. (Revised ed.). Penguin Books. 1972. pp. 7-8.

7. ^ Mark, Joshua J. (13 August 2014). "The World's Oldest Love Poem". '[...] What I held in my hand was one of the oldest love songs written down by the hand of man [...].'

8. ^ Arsu, Şebnem (14 February 2006). "Oldest Line in the World". The New York Times. A small tablet in a special display this month in the Istanbul Museum of the Ancient Orient is thought to be the oldest love poem ever found, the words of a lover from more than 4,000 years ago.

9. ^ Alison Flood (September 2021). "'I don't care': text shows modern poetry began much earlier than believed". www.theguardian.com.

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25. Reproduced form

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Poetry (derived from the Greek , "making"), also called verse, is a 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.

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the art of rhythmical composition, written or spoken, for exciting pleasure by beautiful, imaginative, or elevated thoughts.

www.dictionary.com

# data[].attributes.headline
the art of rhythmical composition, written or spoken, for exciting pleasure by beautiful, imaginative, or elevated thoughts.

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the art of rhythmical composition, written or spoken, for exciting pleasure by beautiful, imaginative, or elevated thoughts.

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https://www.dictionary.com/browse/poetry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
/ ˈpoʊ ɪ tri / PHONETIC RESPELLING

noun

the art of rhythmical composition, written or spoken, for exciting pleasure by beautiful, imaginative, or elevated thoughts.

literary work in metrical form; verse.

poetic qualities however manifested: the poetry of simple acts and things.

poetic spirit or feeling: The pianist played the prelude with poetry.

something suggestive of or likened to poetry: the pure poetry of a beautiful view on a clear day.

QUIZZES

QUIZ YOURSELF ON "SITE," "CITE," AND "SIGHT"!

Set your sights on wordy gold with this quiz on the commonly mixed up words "site," "cite," and sight"!

"Site" and "cite" derive from the same Latin root, "situs."

Origin of poetry

First recorded in 1350-1400; Middle English poetrie, from Medieval Latin poētria "poetic art," derivative of poēta poet, but formation is unclear; probably not from Greek poiḗtria "poetess"

synonym study for poetry

2. Poetry, verse agree in referring to the work of a poet. The difference between poetry and verse is usually the difference between substance and form. Poetry is lofty thought or impassioned feeling expressed in imaginative words: Elizabethan poetry. Verse is any expression in words which simply conforms to accepted metrical rules and structure: the differences between prose and verse.

OTHER WORDS FROM poetry

po·et·ry·less, adjective

Words nearby poetry

poetic licence, poetic license, poetics, poetize, poet laureate, poetry, Poets are born, not made, po-faced, pogamoggan, Pogany, pogey

Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2021

Content related to poetry

Words related to poetry

verse, paean, song, rhyme, poesy, stanza, rime, rune, versification, poems, doggerel, balladry, rhyming

Example sentences from the Web for poetry

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British Dictionary definitions for poetry

noun

literature in metrical form; verse

the art or craft of writing verse

poetic qualities, spirit, or feeling in anything

anything resembling poetry in rhythm, beauty, etc

Word Origin for poetry

C14: from Medieval Latin poētria, from Latin poēta poet

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

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ˈpoʊ ɪ tri / PHONETIC RESPELLING the art of rhythmical composition, written or spoken, for exciting pleasure by beautiful, imaginative, or elevated thoughts. literary work in metrical form; verse. poetic qualities however manifested: the poetry of simple acts and things. poetic spirit or feeling: The pianist played the prelude with poetry.

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"Poetry is written to share ideas, express emotions, and create imagery. Poets choose words for their meaning and acoustics, arranging them to create a tempo known as the meter. Some poems incorporate rhyme schemes, with two or more lines that end in like-sounding words."

https://www.masterclass.com/articles/poetry-101-learn-about-poetry-different-types-of-poems-and-poetic-devices-with-examples

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"is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose"
http://www.poetry.org/whatis.htm

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Poetry

Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose.

It may use condensed or compressed form to convey emotion or ideas to the reader's or listener's mind or ear; it may also use devices such as assonance and repetition to achieve musical or incantatory effects. Poems frequently rely for their effect on imagery, word association, and the musical qualities of the language used. The interactive layering of all these effects to generate meaning is what marks poetry.

Because of its nature of emphasising linguistic form rather than using language purely for its content, poetry is notoriously difficult to translate from one language into another: a possible exception to this might be the Hebrew Psalms, where the beauty is found more in the balance of ideas than in specific vocabulary. In most poetry, it is the connotations and the "baggage" that words carry (the weight of words) that are most important. These shades and nuances of meaning can be difficult to interpret and can cause different readers to "hear" a particular piece of poetry differently. While there are reasonable interpretations, there can never be a definitive interpretation.

Nature of poetry

Poetry can be differentiated most of the time from prose, which is language meant to convey meaning in a more expansive and less condensed way, frequently using more complete logical or narrative structures than poetry does. This does not necessarily imply that poetry is illogical, but rather that poetry is often created from the need to escape the logical, as well as expressing feelings and other expressions in a tight, condensed manner. English Romantic poet John Keats termed this escape from logic Negative Capability. A further complication is that prose poetry combines the characteristics of poetry with the superficial appearance of prose, such as in Robert Frost's poem, "Home Burial." Other forms include narrative poetry and dramatic poetry, both of which are used to tell stories and so resemble novels and plays. However, both these forms of poetry use the specific features of verse composition to make these stories more memorable or to enhance them in some way.

What is generally accepted as "great" poetry is debatable in many cases. "Great" poetry usually follows the characteristics listed above, but it is also set apart by its complexity and sophistication. "Great" poetry generally captures images vividly and in an original, refreshing way, while weaving together an intricate combination of elements like theme tension, complex emotion, and profound reflective thought. For examples of what is considered "great" poetry, visit the Pulitzer prize and Nobel prize sections for poetry.

The Greek verb ποιεω [poio (= I make or create)], gave rise to three words: ποιητης [poiet?s (= the one who creates)], ποιησις [poesis (= the act of creation)] and ποιημα [poema (= the thing created)]. From these we get three English words: poet (the creator), poesy (the creation) and poem (the created). A poet is therefore one who creates and poetry is what the poet creates. The underlying concept of the poet as creator is not uncommon. For example, in Anglo-Saxon a poet is a scop (shaper or maker) and in Scots makar.

Sound in poetry

Perhaps the most vital element of sound in poetry is rhythm. Often the rhythm of each line is arranged in a particular meter. Different types of meter played key roles in Classical, Early European, Eastern and Modern poetry. In the case of free verse, the rhythm of lines is often organized into looser units of cadence.

Poetry in English and other modern European languages often uses rhyme. Rhyme at the end of lines is the basis of a number of common poetic forms, such as ballads, sonnets and rhyming couplets. However, the use of rhyme is not universal. Much modern poetry, for example, avoids traditional rhyme schemes. Furthermore, Classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use rhyme. In fact, rhyme did not enter European poetry at all until the High Middle Ages, when it was adopted from the Arabic language. The Arabs have always used rhymes extensively, most notably in their long, rhyming qasidas. Some classical poetry forms, such as Venpa of the Tamil language, had rigid grammars (to the point that they could be expressed as a context-free grammar), which ensured a rhythm.

Alliteration played a key role in structuring early Germanic and English forms of poetry (called alliterative verse), akin to the role of rhyme in later European poetry. The alliterative patterns of early Germanic poetry and the rhyme schemes of Modern European poetry alike both include meter as a key part of their structure, which determines when the listener expects instances of rhyme or alliteration to occur. In this sense, both alliteration and rhyme, when used in poetic structures, help to emphasise and define a rhythmic pattern. By contrast, the chief device of Biblical poetry in ancient Hebrew was parallelism, a rhetorical structure in which successive lines reflected each other in grammatical structure, sound structure, notional content, or all three; a verse form that lent itself to antiphonal or call- and-response performance.

In addition to the forms of rhyme, alliteration and rhythm that structure much poetry, sound plays a more subtle role in even free verse poetry in creating pleasing, varied patterns and emphasising or sometimes even illustrating semantic elements of the poem. Devices such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, dissonance and internal rhyme are among the ways poets use sound. Euphony refers to the musical, flowing quality of words arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Poetry and form

Compared with prose, poetry depends less on the linguistic units of sentences and paragraphs, and more on units of organisation that are purely poetic. The typical structural elements are the line, couplet, strophe, stanza, and verse paragraph.

Lines may be self-contained units of sense, as in the well-known lines from William Shakespeare's Hamlet:

To be, or not to be: that is the question.
Alternatively a line may end in mid-phrase or sentence:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
this linguistic unit is completed in the next line,
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
This technique is called enjambment, and is used to create a sense of expectation in the reader and/or to add a dynamic to the movement of the verse.
In many instances, the effectiveness of a poem derives from the tension between the use of linguistic and formal units. With the advent of printing, poets gained greater control over the visual presentation of their work. As a result, the use of these formal elements, and of the white space they help create, became an important part of the poet's toolbox. Modernist poetry tends to take this to an extreme, with the placement of individual lines or groups of lines on the page forming an integral part of the poem's composition. In its most extreme form, this leads to the writing of concrete poetry.

Poetry and rhetoric

Rhetorical devices such as simile and metaphor are frequently used in poetry. Indeed, Aristotle wrote in his Poetics that "the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor". However, particularly since the rise of Modernism, some poets have opted for reduced use of these devices, preferring rather to attempt the direct presentation of things and experiences. Other 20th-century poets, however, particularly the surrealists, have pushed rhetorical devices to their limits, making frequent use of catachresis.

History of poetry

Poetry as an art form predates literacy. In preliterate societies, poetry was frequently employed as a means of recording oral history, storytelling (epic poetry), genealogy, law and other forms of expression or knowledge that modern societies might expect to be handled in prose. The Ramayana, a Sanskrit epic which includes poetry, was probably written in the 3rd century BCE in a language described by William Jones as "more perfect than Latin, more copious than Greek and more exquisitely refined than either." Poetry is also often closely identified with liturgy in these societies, as the formal nature of poetry makes it easier to remember priestly incantations or prophecies. The greater part of the world's sacred scriptures are made up of poetry rather than prose.

The use of verse to transmit cultural information continues today. Many English speakingAmericans know that "in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue". An alphabet song teaches the names and order of the letters of the alphabet; another jingle states the lengths and names of the months in the Gregorian calendar. Preliterate societies, lacking the means to write down important cultural information, use similar methods to preserve it.

Some writers believe that poetry has its origins in song. Most of the characteristics that distinguish it from other forms of utterancerhythm, rhyme, compression, intensity of feeling, the use of refrainsappear to have come about from efforts to fit words to musical forms. However, in the European tradition the earliest surviving poems, the Homeric and Hesiodic epics, identify themselves as poems to be recited or chanted to a musical accompaniment rather than as pure song. Another interpretation, developed from 20th-century studies of living Montenegran epic reciters by Milman Parry and others, is that rhythm, refrains, and kennings are essentially paratactic devices that enable the reciter to reconstruct the poem from memory.

In preliterate societies, all these forms of poetry were composed for, and sometimes during, performance. As such, there was a certain degree of fluidity to the exact wording of poems, given this could change from one performance or performer to another. The introduction of writing tended to fix the content of a poem to the version that happened to be written down and survive. Written composition also meant that poets began to compose not for an audience that was sitting in front of them but for an absent reader. Later, the invention of printing tended to accelerate these trends. Poets were now writing more for the eye than for the ear.

The development of literacy gave rise to more personal, shorter poems intended to be sung. These are called lyrics, which derives from the Greek lura or lyre, the instrument that was used to accompany the performance of Greek lyrics from about the seventh century BCE onward. The Greek's practice of singing hymns in large choruses gave rise in the sixth century BCE to dramatic verse, and to the practice of writing poetic plays for performance in their theatres.

In more recent times, the introduction of electronic media and the rise of the poetry reading have led to a resurgence of performance poetry and have resulted in a situation where poetry for the eye and poetry for the ear coexist, sometimes in the same poem. The late 20th-century rise of the singer-songwriter and Rap culture and the increase in popularity of Slam poetry have led to a renewed debate as to the nature of poetry that can be crudely characterised as a split between the academic and popular views. As of 2005, this debate is ongoing with no immediate prospect of a resolution.

Love poems proliferate now, in weblogs and personal pages, as a new way of expression and liberty of hearts, "I have won many female relations with this valid resource", has said a contemporaneus writer called Federic P. Sabeloteur.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose.

# data[].attributes.body
"Poetry is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose."
http://www.poetry.org/whatis.htm

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Poetry

Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose.

It may use condensed or compressed form to convey emotion or ideas to the reader's or listener's mind or ear; it may also use devices such as assonance and repetition to achieve musical or incantatory effects. Poems frequently rely for their effect on imagery, word association, and the musical qualities of the language used. The interactive layering of all these effects to generate meaning is what marks poetry.

Because of its nature of emphasising linguistic form rather than using language purely for its content, poetry is notoriously difficult to translate from one language into another: a possible exception to this might be the Hebrew Psalms, where the beauty is found more in the balance of ideas than in specific vocabulary. In most poetry, it is the connotations and the "baggage" that words carry (the weight of words) that are most important. These shades and nuances of meaning can be difficult to interpret and can cause different readers to "hear" a particular piece of poetry differently. While there are reasonable interpretations, there can never be a definitive interpretation.

Nature of poetry

Poetry can be differentiated most of the time from prose, which is language meant to convey meaning in a more expansive and less condensed way, frequently using more complete logical or narrative structures than poetry does. This does not necessarily imply that poetry is illogical, but rather that poetry is often created from the need to escape the logical, as well as expressing feelings and other expressions in a tight, condensed manner. English Romantic poet John Keats termed this escape from logic Negative Capability. A further complication is that prose poetry combines the characteristics of poetry with the superficial appearance of prose, such as in Robert Frost's poem, "Home Burial." Other forms include narrative poetry and dramatic poetry, both of which are used to tell stories and so resemble novels and plays. However, both these forms of poetry use the specific features of verse composition to make these stories more memorable or to enhance them in some way.

What is generally accepted as "great" poetry is debatable in many cases. "Great" poetry usually follows the characteristics listed above, but it is also set apart by its complexity and sophistication. "Great" poetry generally captures images vividly and in an original, refreshing way, while weaving together an intricate combination of elements like theme tension, complex emotion, and profound reflective thought. For examples of what is considered "great" poetry, visit the Pulitzer prize and Nobel prize sections for poetry.

The Greek verb ποιεω [poio (= I make or create)], gave rise to three words: ποιητης [poiet?s (= the one who creates)], ποιησις [poesis (= the act of creation)] and ποιημα [poema (= the thing created)]. From these we get three English words: poet (the creator), poesy (the creation) and poem (the created). A poet is therefore one who creates and poetry is what the poet creates. The underlying concept of the poet as creator is not uncommon. For example, in Anglo-Saxon a poet is a scop (shaper or maker) and in Scots makar.

Sound in poetry

Perhaps the most vital element of sound in poetry is rhythm. Often the rhythm of each line is arranged in a particular meter. Different types of meter played key roles in Classical, Early European, Eastern and Modern poetry. In the case of free verse, the rhythm of lines is often organized into looser units of cadence.

Poetry in English and other modern European languages often uses rhyme. Rhyme at the end of lines is the basis of a number of common poetic forms, such as ballads, sonnets and rhyming couplets. However, the use of rhyme is not universal. Much modern poetry, for example, avoids traditional rhyme schemes. Furthermore, Classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use rhyme. In fact, rhyme did not enter European poetry at all until the High Middle Ages, when it was adopted from the Arabic language. The Arabs have always used rhymes extensively, most notably in their long, rhyming qasidas. Some classical poetry forms, such as Venpa of the Tamil language, had rigid grammars (to the point that they could be expressed as a context-free grammar), which ensured a rhythm.

Alliteration played a key role in structuring early Germanic and English forms of poetry (called alliterative verse), akin to the role of rhyme in later European poetry. The alliterative patterns of early Germanic poetry and the rhyme schemes of Modern European poetry alike both include meter as a key part of their structure, which determines when the listener expects instances of rhyme or alliteration to occur. In this sense, both alliteration and rhyme, when used in poetic structures, help to emphasise and define a rhythmic pattern. By contrast, the chief device of Biblical poetry in ancient Hebrew was parallelism, a rhetorical structure in which successive lines reflected each other in grammatical structure, sound structure, notional content, or all three; a verse form that lent itself to antiphonal or call- and-response performance.

In addition to the forms of rhyme, alliteration and rhythm that structure much poetry, sound plays a more subtle role in even free verse poetry in creating pleasing, varied patterns and emphasising or sometimes even illustrating semantic elements of the poem. Devices such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, dissonance and internal rhyme are among the ways poets use sound. Euphony refers to the musical, flowing quality of words arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Poetry and form

Compared with prose, poetry depends less on the linguistic units of sentences and paragraphs, and more on units of organisation that are purely poetic. The typical structural elements are the line, couplet, strophe, stanza, and verse paragraph.

Lines may be self-contained units of sense, as in the well-known lines from William Shakespeare's Hamlet:

To be, or not to be: that is the question.
Alternatively a line may end in mid-phrase or sentence:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
this linguistic unit is completed in the next line,
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
This technique is called enjambment, and is used to create a sense of expectation in the reader and/or to add a dynamic to the movement of the verse.
In many instances, the effectiveness of a poem derives from the tension between the use of linguistic and formal units. With the advent of printing, poets gained greater control over the visual presentation of their work. As a result, the use of these formal elements, and of the white space they help create, became an important part of the poet's toolbox. Modernist poetry tends to take this to an extreme, with the placement of individual lines or groups of lines on the page forming an integral part of the poem's composition. In its most extreme form, this leads to the writing of concrete poetry.

Poetry and rhetoric

Rhetorical devices such as simile and metaphor are frequently used in poetry. Indeed, Aristotle wrote in his Poetics that "the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor". However, particularly since the rise of Modernism, some poets have opted for reduced use of these devices, preferring rather to attempt the direct presentation of things and experiences. Other 20th-century poets, however, particularly the surrealists, have pushed rhetorical devices to their limits, making frequent use of catachresis.

History of poetry

Poetry as an art form predates literacy. In preliterate societies, poetry was frequently employed as a means of recording oral history, storytelling (epic poetry), genealogy, law and other forms of expression or knowledge that modern societies might expect to be handled in prose. The Ramayana, a Sanskrit epic which includes poetry, was probably written in the 3rd century BCE in a language described by William Jones as "more perfect than Latin, more copious than Greek and more exquisitely refined than either." Poetry is also often closely identified with liturgy in these societies, as the formal nature of poetry makes it easier to remember priestly incantations or prophecies. The greater part of the world's sacred scriptures are made up of poetry rather than prose.

The use of verse to transmit cultural information continues today. Many English speakingAmericans know that "in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue". An alphabet song teaches the names and order of the letters of the alphabet; another jingle states the lengths and names of the months in the Gregorian calendar. Preliterate societies, lacking the means to write down important cultural information, use similar methods to preserve it.

Some writers believe that poetry has its origins in song. Most of the characteristics that distinguish it from other forms of utterancerhythm, rhyme, compression, intensity of feeling, the use of refrainsappear to have come about from efforts to fit words to musical forms. However, in the European tradition the earliest surviving poems, the Homeric and Hesiodic epics, identify themselves as poems to be recited or chanted to a musical accompaniment rather than as pure song. Another interpretation, developed from 20th-century studies of living Montenegran epic reciters by Milman Parry and others, is that rhythm, refrains, and kennings are essentially paratactic devices that enable the reciter to reconstruct the poem from memory.

In preliterate societies, all these forms of poetry were composed for, and sometimes during, performance. As such, there was a certain degree of fluidity to the exact wording of poems, given this could change from one performance or performer to another. The introduction of writing tended to fix the content of a poem to the version that happened to be written down and survive. Written composition also meant that poets began to compose not for an audience that was sitting in front of them but for an absent reader. Later, the invention of printing tended to accelerate these trends. Poets were now writing more for the eye than for the ear.

The development of literacy gave rise to more personal, shorter poems intended to be sung. These are called lyrics, which derives from the Greek lura or lyre, the instrument that was used to accompany the performance of Greek lyrics from about the seventh century BCE onward. The Greek's practice of singing hymns in large choruses gave rise in the sixth century BCE to dramatic verse, and to the practice of writing poetic plays for performance in their theatres.

In more recent times, the introduction of electronic media and the rise of the poetry reading have led to a resurgence of performance poetry and have resulted in a situation where poetry for the eye and poetry for the ear coexist, sometimes in the same poem. The late 20th-century rise of the singer-songwriter and Rap culture and the increase in popularity of Slam poetry have led to a renewed debate as to the nature of poetry that can be crudely characterised as a split between the academic and popular views. As of 2005, this debate is ongoing with no immediate prospect of a resolution.

Love poems proliferate now, in weblogs and personal pages, as a new way of expression and liberty of hearts, "I have won many female relations with this valid resource", has said a contemporaneus writer called Federic P. Sabeloteur.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose.

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poetry is a highly aesthetic written depiction of the poet's experience, emotion, ideas, or imagination.

Poem in Literature: Definition & Examples | SuperSummary

https://www.supersummary.com › poem

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Poetry is something that is very beautiful or graceful. metrical writing : verse. writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. something likened to poetry especially in beauty of expression

https://www.writingforward.com/poetry-writing/what-is-poetry

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Writing Forward | Creative Writing Tips and Ideas

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Prose Bewitched

"Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea." - Mina Loy

When I read Mina Loy's description of poetry as "prose bewitched," I felt like someone had captured the true essence of poetry for the first time.

We often struggle to define abstract or obtuse concepts. One of the greatest and most challenging questions of all time is "What is art?" Although dictionaries attempt to define art, no definition quite captures its essence, so artists and thinkers have tried to define art in their own words for centuries.

Like the definition of art, the definition of poetry has been explored by writers, thinkers, artists, and poets themselves. So what is it? What is poetry?

Defining Poetry

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary gives us plenty of definitions for the word poetry:

the writings of a poet : poems

something that is very beautiful or graceful

metrical writing : verse

writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm

something likened to poetry especially in beauty of expression

With all due respect to Merriam-Webster, I don't think any of these definitions do poetry justice or truly convey an answer to the question "What is poetry?"

I thought I'd take a stab at defining poetry:

Poetry is a literary art form that can be written, spoken, or performed. It focuses on the aesthetics of language. It is usually composed in verse and is concerned with evoking an image or emotion. Poetry makes liberal use of literary devices, such as alliteration and metaphor. It is the musicality of language, the rendering of abstract thoughts, ideas, and emotions, rendered with words and sounds. It is pictures painted with words.

As you can see, I can't capture the essence of poetry any better than a dictionary. Poetry is all of these things and none of these things. There's a magic in poetry that is difficult to describe in words, even though poetry itself often uses words to create magic.

What is Poetry?

I think we need poetry itself in order to truly convey what poetry is. Robert Frost gives us a definition of poetry that is from the poet's perspective:

"Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words." - Robert Frost

Do you ever write poetry? Which poems and poets are your favorites? How would you answer the question, "What is poetry?" Share your thoughts and ideas by leaving a comment, and keep writing poetry!

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Let's try to answer the question, what is poetry?

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: writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm

www.merriam-webster.com

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literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm; poems collectively or as a genre of literature.

https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+poetry&rlz=1CAJJUF_enUS819US819&oq=what+is+poetry&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i61.13133j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&safe=active&ssui=on

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Please click here if you are not redirected within a few seconds.

po·et·ry

literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm; poems collectively or as a genre of literature.

"he is chiefly famous for his love poetry"

synonyms: poems, verse, verses, versification, metrical composition, rhythmical composition, rhymes, rhyming, balladry, penillion, poesy, Parnassus

Poetry, also called verse, is a 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. Wikipedia

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Please click here if you are not redirected within a few seconds. po·et·ry literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm; poems collectively or as a genre of literature.

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Poetry is a literary art form that can be written, spoken, or performed. It focuses on the aesthetics of language. It is usually composed in verse and is concerned with evoking an image or emotion.

www.writingforward.com

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"literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm."
https://www.britannica.com/art/poetry

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Table of Contents

Read a brief summary of this topic

poetry, literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm.

Poetry is a vast subject, as old as history and older, present wherever religion is present, possibly-under some definitions-the primal and primary form of languages themselves. The present article means only to describe in as general a way as possible certain properties of poetry and of poetic thought regarded as in some sense independent modes of the mind. Naturally, not every tradition nor every local or individual variation can be-or need be-included, but the article illustrates by examples of poetry ranging between nursery rhyme and epic. This article considers the difficulty or impossibility of defining poetry; man's nevertheless familiar acquaintance with it; the differences between poetry and prose; the idea of form in poetry; poetry as a mode of thought; and what little may be said in prose of the spirit of poetry.

Attempts to define poetry

Poetry is the other way of using language. Perhaps in some hypothetical beginning of things it was the only way of using language or simply was language tout court, prose being the derivative and younger rival. Both poetry and language are fashionably thought to have belonged to ritual in early agricultural societies; and poetry in particular, it has been claimed, arose at first in the form of magical spells recited to ensure a good harvest. Whatever the truth of this hypothesis, it blurs a useful distinction: by the time there begins to be a separate class of objects called poems, recognizable as such, these objects are no longer much regarded for their possible yam-growing properties, and such magic as they may be thought capable of has retired to do its business upon the human spirit and not directly upon the natural world outside.

Formally, poetry is recognizable by its greater dependence on at least one more parameter, the line, than appears in prose composition. This changes its appearance on the page; and it seems clear that people take their cue from this changed appearance, reading poetry aloud in a very different voice from their habitual voice, possibly because, as Ben Jonson said, poetry "speaketh somewhat above a mortal mouth." If, as a test of this description, people are shown poems printed as prose, it most often turns out that they will read the result as prose simply because it looks that way; which is to say that they are no longer guided in their reading by the balance and shift of the line in relation to the breath as well as the syntax.

That is a minimal definition but perhaps not altogether uninformative. It may be all that ought to be attempted in the way of a definition: Poetry is the way it is because it looks that way, and it looks that way because it sounds that way and vice versa.

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Poetry | Definition, Types, Terms, Examples, & Facts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
poetry, literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm. Poetry is a vast subject, as old as history and older, present wherever religion is present, possibly-under some definitions-the primal and primary form of languages themselves.