Poetry is a literary form that seeks to heighten the expression of ideas or feelings through the use of distinctive rhythms and other poetic devices. A popular form since antiquity when it was traditionally an oral format, poetry is often regarded as the most elevated mode of literary expression.
‘Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.’
Matthew Arnold
Evolving poetry
Poetry has constantly adapted and evolved to cater for the demands of new generations of poets and their audiences. These include formal innovations – such as the fourteen-line sonnet beloved of Petrarch and Shakespeare – as well as original treatments of subject matter, whether the natural landscapes beloved of the Romantics, the nonsense verse of Edward Lear or the reality of urban existence depicted in rap lyrics. Poetry, though, has proved resilient because of its consistent ability to touch the reader, or listener, in a profound way. As the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth put it, ‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . .’
Aside from rhythm (the repetitive beat or metre of a poem), other weapons in the poet’s armoury include alliteration (in which the first letter of a word is repeated in the following words), dissonance (a combination of discordant sounds), imagery (including similes, metaphors and personification), symbolism, onomatopoeia (where a word sounds like the noise it is describing), repetition, rhyme and tone (i.e. the mood of a piece). This, though, is far from an exhaustive list.
The word poetry comes from the Greek for ‘making’, and poetry probably emerged in prehistoric communities as a way to share stories and recall events. The oldest known poem is the Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of King Gilgamesh written in Mesopotamia sometime around 3000 BCE. The theory of poetry, meanwhile, was first investigated in Aristotle’s Poetics (which is, in fact, a 4th-century-BCE treatise on drama, an art form closely connected with poetry in ancient Greece).
Aristotle’s ideas were of enormous influence right up to the modern age, by which time the major categories of poetry were usually defined as epic, lyric and dramatic (which included tragedy and comedy; see entry on Drama here). An epic is essentially a lengthy narrative poem, often telling the story of a heroic figure or historical events – examples of which include Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Lyric poetry, by contrast, tends to be shorter and was traditionally intended to be sung (the custom of accompaniment by a lyre giving the genre its name).