This article is about the art form. For other uses, see Poetry (disambiguation).

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"Poem", "Poems", and "Poetic" redirect here. For other uses, see Poem (disambiguation), Poems (disambiguation), and Poetic (disambiguation). Poetry (from the Greek poiesis with a broad meaning of a "making", seen also in such terms as "hemopoiesis"; more narrowly, the making of poetry) is a form of literary art which [1][2][3] uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of languagesuch 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'sPoetics, 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 ofpoetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations. [4] Similarly, metaphor, simile and metonymy 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 [5] rhythm and euphony. Much modern poetry reflects a critique of poetic tradition, playing with and testing, among other things, the principle of euphony itself, sometimes altogether forgoing rhyme or [6][7] set rhythm. In today's increasingly globalized world, poets often adapt forms, styles and techniques from diverse cultures and languages.
Contents
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1 History

o o

1.1 Western traditions 1.2 20th-century disputes

2 Elements

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 4 Genres

5 See also 6 Notes 7 Further reading

7.1 Anthologies

History

Aristotle

Main articles: History of poetry and Literary theory Poetry as an art form may predate literacy. Epic poetry, from the Indian Vedas (17001200 BC) and Zoroaster's Gathas to the Odyssey (800675 BC), appears to have been composed in poetic [9] form to aid memorization and oral transmission, in prehistoric and ancient societies. Other forms of poetry developed directly from folk songs. The earliest entries in the ancient compilation Shijing, were [10] initially lyrics, preceding later entries intended to be read. 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 scripton clay tablets and, [11] later, papyrus. Other ancient epic poetry includes the Greek epics Iliad and Odyssey, the Old Iranian books the Gathic Avesta andYasna, 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 [12] poetry. 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 [13] 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 Bash's Oku no Hosomichi, as well as differences in context spanning Tanakh religious poetry, love [14] poetry, and rap.
[8]

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, [15] based on the 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 [16] poetry. Aristotle's work was influential throughout the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age, as well [18] as in Europe during the Renaissance. Later poets and aestheticians often distinguished poetry from, and defined it in opposition to prose, which was generally understood as writing with a proclivity [19] 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 [20] 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 [21] the 20th century. During this period, there was also substantially more interaction among the various poetic traditions, [22] in part due to the spread of European colonialism and the attendant rise in global trade. In addition [23] to a boom in translation, during the Romantic period numerous ancient works were rediscovered.
[17]

20th-century disputes

Archibald MacLeish

Some 20th-century literary theorists, relying less on the opposition of prose and poetry, focused on [24] 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 [25] 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 [26] older forms and structures. 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 [27] 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 were once [28] sensible within a tradition such as theWestern canon.

Elements
Prosody
Main article: Meter (poetry) Prosody is the study of the meter, rhythm, and intonation of a poem. Rhythm and meter are different, [29] although closely related. Meter is the definitive pattern established for a verse (such asiambic pentameter), while rhythm is the actual sound that results from a line of poetry. Prosody also may be [30] used more specifically to refer to the scanning of poetic lines to show meter.

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 byaccents, 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. Varying intonation also affects how rhythm is perceived. Languages can rely on either pitch, such as in Vedic Sanskrit or Ancient Greek, or [32] tone.Tonal languages include Chinese, Vietnamese, Lithuanian, and most Subsaharan languages. 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 [33] and unstressed syllables (alone or elided). In the classical languages, on the other hand, while [34] 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 [35] 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-andresponse 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 [36] 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) [37] which ensured a rhythm. In Chinese poetry, tones as well as stresses create rhythm. Classical [38] Chinese poetics identifies four tones: the level tone, rising tone, departing tone, and entering tone. 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 [39] [40] poetry. Jeffers experimented with sprung rhythm as an alternative to accentual rhythm.

[31]

Meter
Main article: Systems of scansion In the Western poetic tradition, meters are customarily grouped according to a characteristic metrical [41] foot and the number of feet per line. The number of metrical feet in a line are described using [42] 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 [43] of Homer and Hesiod. Iambic pentameter and dactylic hexameter were later used by a number of [44] poets, including William Shakespeare and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, respectively. The most [45] common metrical feet in English are:

Homer

iamb one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (e.g. describe, Include, retract) trochee one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable (e.g. picture, flower) dactyl one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables (e.g. annotate an-no-tate) anapest two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable (e.g. comprehend com-prehend) spondee two stressed syllables together (e.g. e-nough) 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. [43] The choriamb is derived from some ancient Greek and Latin poetry. Languages which utilize vowel length orintonation 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 [46] 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 [47] 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 [48] and lengths of syllables.

A Holiday illustration toCarroll's "The Hunting of the Snark", which is written mainly in anapestic tetrameter.

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 [49] 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 [50] distinguish an unaccented stress from an accented stress.

Metrical patterns
Main article: Meter (poetry) Different traditions and genres of poetry tend to use different meters, ranging from the Shakespearean iambic pentameter and the Homeric dactylic hexameter to theanapestic 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 [51] 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 [52] occurs to a much lesser extent, in English.

Alexander Pushkin

Some common metrical patterns, with notable examples of poets and poems who use them, include: Iambic pentameter (John Milton in Paradise Lost, William Shakespeare in his Sonnets) Dactylic hexameter (Homer, Iliad; Virgil, Aeneid)
[54] [53]

Iambic tetrameter (Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"; Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene [55] Onegin, Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening) Trochaic octameter (Edgar Allan Poe, "The Raven") Alexandrine (Jean Racine, Phdre)
[57] [56]