Poetry (from the Latin Latin or sometimes Roman is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Although often considered a dead language, in view of the fact that it has no native speakers, a small number of scholars can fluently speak it and it continues to be taught in schools and universities and has been, and currently is, used in the process of poeta, a poet) is a form of literary Literature , is the art of written works. Literally translated, the word literature means "acquaintance with letters" (as in the "arts and letters"). The two most basic written literary categories include fiction and nonfiction art Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging symbolic elements in a way that influences and affects the senses, emotions, and/or intellect. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, photography, sculpture, and paintings. The meaning of art is explored in a in which language Language is a term most commonly used to refer to so-called "natural languages" — the spoken forms of communication ubiquitous among humankind. By extension the term also refers to the type of thought process which creates and uses language. Essential to both meanings is the systematic creation, maintenance and use of systems of is used for its aesthetic Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste. More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as "critical and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning The field of semantics is often understood as a branch of linguistics, but non-idealized meaning as a type of semantics is more accurately a branch of psychology and ethics. Meaning in so far is it is objectified by not considering particular situations and the real intentions of speakers and writers examines the ways in which words, phrases, and. Poetry may be written independently, as discrete poems, or may occur in conjunction with other arts, as in poetic drama Verse drama is any drama written as verse to be spoken; another possible general term is poetic drama. For a very long period, verse drama was the dominant form of drama in Europe . Greek tragedy and Racine's plays are written in verse, as is almost all of Shakespeare's drama, and Goethe's Faust, hymns A hymn is a type of song, usually religious, specifically written for the purpose of praise, adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity or deities, or to a prominent figure or personification. The word hymn derives from Greek ὕμνος , which means "a song of praise." Collections of hymns are known as hymnals or hymnbooks, lyrics Lyrics are a set of words that make up a song. The writer of lyrics is a lyricist or lyrist. The meaning of lyrics can either be explicit or implicit. Some lyrics are abstract, almost unintelligible, and, in such cases, their explication emphasizes form, articulation, meter, and symmetry of expression. The lyricist of traditional musical forms, or prose poetry Prose poetry, as it is usually understood, is poetry written in prose that departs from some of the usual practices associated with prose discourse, for the sake of heightened imagery or emotional effect. It is published in dedicated magazines (the longest established being Poetry Poetry, published in Chicago, Illinois since 1912, is one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world. Published by the Poetry Foundation and currently edited by Christian Wiman, the magazine has a circulation of 30,000 and prints 300 poems per year out of approximately 90,000 submissions and Oxford Poetry Oxford Poetry is a literary magazine based in Oxford, England. It is currently edited by Hamid Khanbhai and Thomas A Richards), individual collections and wider anthologies.

Poetry, and discussions of it, have a long history Poetry as an art form predates literacy. Some of the earliest poetry is believed to have been orally recited or sung. Following the development of writing, poetry has since developed into increasingly structured forms, though much poetry since the late 20th century has moved away from traditional forms towards the more vaguely defined free verse. Early attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most's Poetics Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest-surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory. In it, Aristotle offers an account of what he calls "poetry" (a term which in Greek literally meant "making" and in this context includes drama–comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play–as, focused on the uses of speech Speech is the vocalized form of human communication. It is based upon the syntactic combination of lexicals and names that are drawn from very large vocabularies. Each spoken word is created out of the phonetic combination of a limited set of vowel and consonant speech sound units. These vocabularies, the syntax which structures them, and their in rhetoric Rhetoric is the art of using language to communicate effectively. It involves three audience appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos, as well as the five canons of rhetoric: invention or discovery, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Along with grammar and logic or dialectic, rhetoric is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. From ancient, drama Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do" (Classical Greek: δράω, drao). The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a, song In music, a song is a composition that contains vocal parts that are performed ("sung"), commonly accompanied by musical instruments, exception in the case of a cappella songs. The lyrics of songs are typically of a poetic, rhyming nature, although they may be religious verses or free prose, and comedy Comedy as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse generally intended to amuse, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in Ancient Greece. In the Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was.^[1] Later attempts concentrated on features such as repetition, verse form A line in poetry is a unit of language into which a poem is divided which operates on principles which are distinct from and not necessarily coincident with grammatical structures such as the sentence or clauses in sentences. Although the word for a single poetic line is verse, this term now tends to be used to signify poetic form more generally and rhyme A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and songs. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes, and emphasized the aesthetics which distinguish poetry from more objectively informative, prosaic Prose is the most typical form of language. The English word 'prose' is derived from the Latin prōsa, which literally translates as 'straight-forward.' While there are critical debates on the construction of prose, its simplicity and loosely defined structure has led to its adoption for the majority of spoken dialogue, factual discourse as well forms of writing, such as manifestos A manifesto is a public declaration of principles and intentions, often political in nature. Manifestos relating to religious belief are generally referred to as a creed. Manifestos may also be life stance-related, biographies A biography is a description or account of someone's life and the times, which is usually published in the form of a book or an essay, or in some other form, such as a film. An autobiography is a biography of a person's life written or told by that same person. A biography is more than a list of impersonal facts (education, work, relationships,, essays An essay is a short piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition of an essay is vague, overlapping with, and novels A novel is a long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century .^[2] From the mid-20th century, poetry has sometimes been more loosely defined as a fundamental creative act using language Language is a term most commonly used to refer to so-called "natural languages" — the spoken forms of communication ubiquitous among humankind. By extension the term also refers to the type of thought process which creates and uses language. Essential to both meanings is the systematic creation, maintenance and use of systems of.^[3]

Poetry often uses particular forms and conventions to suggest alternative meanings in the words, or to evoke emotional or sensual responses. Devices such as assonance Assonance is the refrain of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance serves as one of the building blocks of verse. For example, in the phrase "Do you like blue?", the /uː/ is repeated within the sentence and is assonant, alliteration In poetry, alliteration refers to repetition of a consonant in any syllables that, according to the poem's meter, are stressed as if they occurred at the beginning of a word, as in James Thomson's verse "Come…dragging the lazy languid Line along", onomatopoeia An onomatopoeia or onomatopœia Onomatopoeia (help·info) (from the Greek ὀνοματοποιία; ὄνομα for "name" and ποιέω for "I make") (adjectival form: "onomatopoeic" or "onomatopoetic") is a word that imitates or suggests the source of the sound that it describes. Onomatopoeia (as an, and rhythm Rhythm is a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." In other words, rhythm is simply the timing of the musical sounds and silences. While rhythm most commonly applies to sound, such as music and spoken language, it may also refer to visual presentation, as " are sometimes used to achieve musical Music is an art form whose medium is sound. Common elements of music are pitch , rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture. The word derives from Greek μουσική (mousike), "(art) of the Muses." or incantatory An incantation or enchantment is a charm or spell created using words. An incantation may take place during a ritual, either a hymn or prayer, and may invoke or praise a deity. In magic, occultism, witchcraft it may be used with the intention of casting a spell on an object or a person. The term derives from Latin "incantare" , meaning & effects. The use of ambiguity Ambiguity is a condition where information can be understood or interpreted in more than one way and is distinct from vagueness, which is a statement about the lack of precision contained or available in the information. Context may play a role in resolving ambiguity. For example the same piece of information may be ambiguous in one context and, symbolism A symbol is something such as an object, picture, written word, sound, or particular mark that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On maps, crossed sabres may indicate a battlefield. Numerals are symbols for numbers . All language consists of symbols, irony Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is an incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident meaning of words or actions, and other stylistic Stylistics is the study of varieties of language whose properties position that language in context, and tries to establish principles capable of accounting for the particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language. A variety, in this sense, is a situationally distinctive use of language. For example, the language elements of poetic diction Poetic diction is the term used to refer to the linguistic style, the vocabulary, and the metaphors used in the writing of poetry. In the Western tradition, all these elements were thought of as properly different in poetry and prose up to the time of the Romantic revolution, when William Wordsworth challenged the distinction in his Romantic often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations. Similarly, metaphor A metaphor is an analogy between two objects or ideas; the analogy is conveyed by the use of a metaphorical word in place of some other word. For example: "Her eyes were glistening jewels", simile A simile is a figure of speech comparing two unlike things, often introduced with the words "like", "as", or "than". Even though similes and metaphors are both forms of comparison, similes allow the two ideas to remain distinct in spite of their similarities, whereas metaphors compare two things without using ", and metonymy Metonymy is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept. For instance, "Washington", as the capital of the United States, can be used as a metonym (an instance of metonymy) for its government^[4] create a resonance between otherwise disparate images—a layering of meanings The field of semantics is often understood as a branch of linguistics, but non-idealized meaning as a type of semantics is more accurately a branch of psychology and ethics. Meaning in so far is it is objectified by not considering particular situations and the real intentions of speakers and writers examines the ways in which words, phrases, and, forming connections previously not perceived. Kindred forms of resonance may exist, between individual verses A verse is formally a single line in a metrical composition, e.g. poetry. However, the word has come to represent any division or grouping of words in such a composition, which traditionally had been referred to as a stanza, in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm.

Some forms of poetry are specific to particular cultures Culture is a term that has various meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. However, the word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses: and genres Genre (pronounced /ˈʒɑːnrə/, also /ˈdʒɑːnrə/; from French, genre French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ʀ], "kind" or "sort", from Latin: genus , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature, as well as various other forms of art or culture e.g. music, based on some loose set of stylistic criteria, responding to the characteristics of the language in which the poet writes. While readers accustomed to identifying poetry with Dante Dante Alighieri , commonly known as Dante, was an Italian poet of the Middle Ages. He was born in Florence. He died and is buried in Ravenna. The name Dante is, according to the words of Jacopo Alighieri, a hypocorism for Durante. In contemporary documents it is followed by the patronymic Alagherii or de Alagheriis; it was Boccaccio who, Goethe Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German pronunciation: [ˈjoːhan ˈvɔlfɡaŋ fɔn ˈɡøːtə] , 28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German writer and polymath. Goethe's works span the fields of poetry, drama, literature, theology, philosophy, pantheism, and science. His magnum opus, lauded as one of the peaks of world literature, is the two-part, Mickiewicz Adam Bernard Mickiewicz [mit​͡sˈkʲɛvit​͡ʂ] (Belarusian: Адам Міцкевіч; Lithuanian: Adomas Bernardas Mickevičius; December 24, 1798 – November 26, 1855) was a Romantic poet, writing in the Polish language, and described variously as a Pole, a Lithuanian or a Polish-Lithuanian. He is one of Poland's Three Bards – a and Rumi Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī , also known as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (Persian: جلال‌الدین محمد رومی), and popularly known as Mowlānā (Persian: مولانا) but known to the English-speaking world simply as Rumi (30 September 1207 – 17 December 1273), was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, theologian, and may think of it as being written in lines based upon rhyme and regular meter, there are traditions, such as Biblical poetry, that use other approaches to achieve rhythm and euphony. Much of modern British and American poetry is to some extent a critique of poetic tradition,^[5] playing with and testing (among other things) the principle of euphony itself, to the extent that sometimes it deliberately does not rhyme or keep to set rhythms at all.^[6][7][8] In today's globalized world poets often borrow styles, techniques and forms from diverse cultures and languages.

History

Poetry as an art form may predate literacy.^[9] Many ancient works, from the Indian Vedas (1700–1200 BC) and Zoroaster's Gathas (1200-900 BC) to the Odyssey (800–675 BC), appear to have been composed in poetic form to aid memorization and oral transmission, in prehistoric and ancient societies.^[10] Poetry appears among the earliest records of most literate cultures, with poetic fragments found on early monoliths, runestones, and stelae.

The oldest surviving epic poem is the Epic of Gilgamesh, from the 3rd millennium BC in Sumer (in Mesopotamia, now Iraq), which was written in cuneiform script on clay tablets and, later, papyrus.^[11] Other ancient epic poetry includes the Greek epics Iliad and Odyssey, the Old Iranian books the Gathic Avesta and Yasna, the Roman national epic, Virgil's Aeneid, and the Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata.

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 the Chinese through the Shi Jing, one of the Five Classics of Confucianism, 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 context spanning Tanakh religious poetry, love poetry, and rap.^[12]

Context can be critical to poetics and to the development of poetic genres and forms. Poetry that records historic events in epics, such as Gilgamesh or Ferdowsi's Shahnameh,^[13] will necessarily be lengthy and narrative, while poetry used for liturgical purposes (hymns, psalms, suras, and hadiths) is likely to have an inspirational tone, whereas elegy and tragedy are meant to evoke deep emotional responses. Other contexts include Gregorian chants, formal or diplomatic speech,^[14] political rhetoric and invective,^[15] light-hearted nursery and nonsense rhymes, and even medical texts.^[16]

The Polish historian of aesthetics, Władysław Tatarkiewicz, in a paper on "The Concept of Poetry," traces the evolution of what is in fact two concepts of poetry. Tatarkiewicz points out that the term is applied to two distinct things that, as the poet Paul Valéry observed, "at a certain point find union. Poetry [...] is an art based on language. But poetry also has a more general meaning [...] that is difficult to define because it is less determinate: poetry expresses a certain state of mind." ^[17]

Show All>>

What Links Here:

Most Popular Pages:

Related 'Poets' Searches: