Poetry is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic[1][2][3] qualities of language

such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metreto evoke meanings in addition to, or in
place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning.
Poetry has a long history, dating back to the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Early poems
evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing, or from a need to retell oral epics, as
with the Sanskrit Vedas, Zoroastrian Gathas, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the
Odyssey. Ancient 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 forms of writing. From the mid-20th century,
poetry has sometimes been more generally regarded as a fundamental creative act employing
language.
Poetry uses forms and conventions to suggest differential interpretation to words, or to evoke
emotive responses. Devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhythm are
sometimes used to achieve musical or incantatory effects. The use of ambiguity, symbolism,
irony and other stylistic elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple
interpretations. Similarly figures of speech such as metaphor, simile and metonymy[4] create a
resonance between otherwise disparate imagesa layering of meanings, forming connections
previously not perceived. Kindred forms of resonance may exist, between individual verses,
in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm.
Some poetry types are specific 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 and Rumi may think of it as written in lines based on rhyme and
regular meter; there are, however, traditions, such as Biblical poetry, that use other means to
create rhythm and euphony. Much modern poetry reflects a critique of poetic tradition,[5]
playing with and testing, among other things, the principle of euphony itself, sometimes
altogether forgoing rhyme or set rhythm.[6][7] In today's increasingly globalized world, poets
often adapt forms, styles and techniques from diverse cultures and languages.

Contents

1 History
o 1.1 Western traditions
o

1.2 20th-century and 21st-century disputes

2 Elements
o

2.1 Prosody

2.1.1 Rhythm

2.1.2 Meter

2.1.3 Metrical patterns

2.2 Rhyme, alliteration, assonance

2.2.1 Rhyming schemes

2.3 Form

2.3.1 Lines and stanzas

2.3.2 Visual presentation

2.4 Diction

3 Forms
o

3.1 Sonnet

3.2 Shi

3.3 Villanelle

3.4 Tanka

3.5 Haiku

3.6 Ode

3.7 Ghazal

4 Genres
o

4.1 Narrative poetry

4.2 Epic poetry

4.3 Dramatic poetry

4.4 Satirical poetry

4.5 Light poetry

4.6 Lyric poetry

4.7 Elegy

4.8 Verse fable

4.9 Prose poetry

4.10 Speculative poetry

5 See also

6 References

7 Further reading
o

7.1 Anthologies

History

Aristotle
Main articles: History of poetry and Literary theory
Poetry as an art form may predate literacy.[8] 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.[9] A tablet dating to c. 2000 BC
describes an annual rite in which the king symbolically married and mated with the goddess
Inanna to ensure fertility and prosperity, and is considered the world's oldest love poem.[10][11]
Examples of Egyptian epic poetry include The Story of Sinuhe (c. 1800 BC). Other ancient
epic poetry includes the Greek epics Iliad and Odyssey, the Avestan books the Gathic Avesta
and Yasna, the Roman national epic, Virgil's Aeneid, and the Indian epics Ramayana and
Mahabharata.
Epic poetry, including the Indian Vedas, the Gathasand the Odysse BC), appears to have been
composed in poetic form to aid memorization and oral transmission, in prehistoric and
ancient societies.[12] Other forms of poetry developed directly from folk songs. The earliest
entries in the ancient compilation Shijing, were initially lyrics, preceding later entries
intended to be read.[13]
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.[14] Some ancient poetic traditions; such as, contextually, Classical Chinese poetry in
the case of the Shijing (Classic of Poetry), which records the development of poetic canons
with ritual and aesthetic importance.[15] 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 Bash's Oku no Hosomichi, as well as differences in context
spanning Tanakh religious poetry, love poetry, and rap.[16]

Western traditions

John Keats
Classical thinkers 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 poetrythe
epic, the comic, and the tragicand develop rules to distinguish the highest-quality poetry in
each genre, based on the underlying purposes of the genre.[17] Later aestheticians identified
three major genres: epic poetry, lyric poetry, and dramatic poetry, treating comedy and
tragedy as subgenres of dramatic poetry.[18]
Aristotle's work was influential throughout the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age,[19]
as well as in Europe during the Renaissance.[20] Later poets and aestheticians often
distinguished poetry from, and defined it in opposition to prose, which was generally
understood as writing with a proclivity to logical explication and a linear narrative structure.
[21]

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".[22] 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.[23]
During this period, 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.[24] In addition to a boom in translation, during the Romantic period numerous ancient
works were rediscovered.[25]

20th-century and 21st-century disputes

Archibald MacLeish

Some 20th-century literary theorists, relying less on the opposition of prose and poetry,
focused on the poet as simply one who creates using language, and poetry as what the poet
creates.[26] 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.[27]
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 nontraditional 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.[28]
Recently, postmodernism has come to convey more completely prose and poetry as distinct
entities, and also among genres of poetry, as having meaning only as cultural artifacts.
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.[29] 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 were once sensible within a
tradition such as the Western canon.[30]
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 has used the phrase "the anxiety of demand" to describe
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 Bloom who has stated in summary form concerning the early 21st
century that: "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."[31]

Elements
Prosody
Main article: Meter (poetry)
Prosody is the study of the meter, rhythm, and intonation of a poem. Rhythm and meter are
different, although closely related.[32] 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.[33]

Rhythm
Main articles: Timing (linguistics), tone (linguistics) and Pitch accent

Robinson Jeffers
The methods for creating poetic rhythm vary across languages and between poetic traditions.
Languages are often described as having timing set primarily by accents, syllables, or moras,
depending on how rhythm is established, though a language can be influenced by multiple
approaches. Japanese is a mora-timed language. Syllable-timed languages include Latin,
Catalan, French, Leonese, Galician and Spanish. English, Russian and, generally, German are
stress-timed languages.[34] Varying intonation also affects how rhythm is perceived.
Languages can rely on either pitch, such as in Vedic Sanskrit or Ancient Greek, or tone. Tonal
languages include Chinese, Vietnamese and most Subsaharan languages.[35]
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).[36] In the classical languages, on
the other hand, while the metrical units are similar, vowel length rather than stresses define
the meter.[37] Old English poetry used a metrical pattern involving varied numbers of syllables
but a fixed number of strong stresses in each line.[38]
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.[39] 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. [40] In Chinese poetry,
tones as well as stresses create rhythm. Classical Chinese poetics identifies four tones: the
level tone, rising tone, departing tone, and entering tone.[41]
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.[42] Jeffers experimented with sprung rhythm as an
alternative to accentual rhythm.[43]