Portal:Poetry
Welcome to the Poetry Portal
Poetry (from the Greek word poiesis, "making") is a form of literary art that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, literal or surface-level meanings. Any particular instance of poetry is called a poem and is written by a poet. Poets use a variety of techniques called poetic devices, such as assonance, alliteration, euphony and cacophony, onomatopoeia, rhythm (via metre), and sound symbolism, to produce musical or incantatory effects. Most poems are formatted in verse: a series or stack of lines on a page, which follow a rhythmic or other deliberate pattern. For this reason, verse has also become a synonym (a metonym) for poetry.
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 poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, was written in the Sumerian language.
Early poems in the Eurasian continent evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing as well as from religious hymns (the Sanskrit Rigveda, the Zoroastrian Gathas, the Hurrian songs, and the Hebrew Psalms); or from a need to retell oral epics, as with the Egyptian Story of Sinuhe, Indian epic poetry, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. (Full article...)
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Did you know (auto-generated) -
- ... that in the Six Poems by Marina Tsvetayeva, Dmitri Shostakovich wanted to convey how he imagined the poet's voice, "husky, hefty, occluded in the smoke of homegrown tobacco"?
- ... that a 1982 composition by David Sampson is based on a 1931 poem inspired by the ancient Greek Eleusinian Mysteries?
- ... that Isabella Correa was one of the few Jewish women poets active in the Netherlands before the 19th century?
- ... that Burton Raffel called Arthur Cooper's translation of a poem by Du Fu "exceedingly lame"?
- ... that Ida Ospelt-Amann led the revival of dialect poetry in Liechtenstein and was awarded the Golden Cross of Merit?
- ... that poet Peggy Pond Church became a strong pacifist and a member of the Society of Friends after the Manhattan Project used her home as a place to build nuclear weapons?
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Clouds will separate us by Matsuo Basho |
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Clouds will separate us — |
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