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For the American journal, see Poetry (magazine).

Poetry is an art form in which language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to or instead of its ostensible meaning. Poetry has a long history, and early attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle's Poetics, focused on the various uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song and comedy. Later attempts focused on the deliberate use of features such as repetition and rhyme and the emphasis on aesthetics to distinguish poetry from prose. Contemporary poets, such as Dylan Thomas, often identify poetry not as a literary genre within a set of genres, but as a fundamental creative act using language.

Poetry often uses condensed forms and conventions to reinforce or expand the meaning of the underlying words or to invoke emotional or sensual experiences in the reader, as well as using devices such as assonance, alliteration and rhythm to achieve musical or incantatory effects. Poetry's use of ambiguity, symbolism, irony and other stylistic elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations.

Specific forms of poetry have become traditional within and across different cultures and genres, and often respond to underlying characteristics of the language in which poetry is created. Each language's richness in rhyme and method of creating timing and tonal differences provides distinct opportunities for poets writing in that language. While those accustomed to identifying poetry with Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe may understand poetry by reference primarily to rhyming lines and regular accentual meter, other traditions, such as those of Du Fu and Beowulf, use other methods to achieve rhythm and euphony. In today's globalized world, poets often borrow styles, techniques and forms from different cultures and languages.

Poetics and history

The history of poetry as an art form may predate literacy, and early oral poetry may have used rhyme, rhythm, and other formal systems as mnemonic devices. Many ancient works, from the Odyssey to the Vedas, appear to have been composed as poetry to aid memorization and assist in oral transmission in prehistoric societies. Poetry appears among the earliest records of most literate cultures, with poetic fragments found on early monoliths such as rune stones and stelae. Among the oldest surviving poems are those of Gilgamesh, from the third millenia BC in Sumer, which were written in cuneiform script on clay tablets and, later, papyrus.

Ancient thinkers sought to determine what makes poetry distinctive as a form and what distinguishes good poetry from bad, resulting in the development of "poetics", or 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 struggled to find a definition that could encompass formal differences as great as those between Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and Matsuo Bashō's Oku no Hosomichi, as well as differences in context that span from the religious poetry of the Tanakh to love poetry to rap.

Context can be critical to poetics and to the development of poetic genres and forms. For example, poetry employed to record historical events in epics, such as Gilgamesh or Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, will necessarily be lengthy and narrative, while poetry used for liturgical purposes in hymns, psalms, suras and hadiths is likely to have an inspirational tone, and elegies and tragedy are intended to invoke deep internal emotional responses. Other contexts include music such as Gregorian chants, formal or diplomatic speech, political rhetoric and invective, light-hearted nursery and nonsense rhymes, and even medical texts.

Classical and early modern Western traditions

Classical thinkers employed classification as a way to define and assess the quality of poetry. Notably, Aristotle's Poetics describes the three genres of poetry: the epic, comic, and tragic, and seeks to develop rules to distinguish the highest quality poetry of each genre based on the underlying purposes of that genre. Later aestheticians identified three major genres: epic poetry, lyric poetry and dramatic poetry, treating comedy and tragedy as subgenres of dramatic poetry. Aristotle's work was influential throughout the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age, as well 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 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 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 the twentieth century. During this period, there was also significantly more interaction among the various poetic traditions, in part because of the spread of European colonialism and the attendant rise in global trade. In addition to the boom in translation, numerous ancient works were also rediscovered during the Romantic period.

Twentieth century disputes

Relying much less on the opposition of prose and poetry, some literary theorists of the twentieth-century focused on the poet as 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 do not significantly distinguish between the creation of a poem with words and creative acts in other media, such as carpentry. Yet other modernists challenge the very attempt to define poetry as misguided, as when Archibald MacLeish concludes his ironic poem "Ars Poetica" with the lines "A poem should not mean / but be."

Intellectual disputes over the definition of poetry and its distinction from other genres of literature were inextricably intertwined with the debate over the role of poetic form. The rejection of traditional forms and structures for poetry that began in the first half of the twentieth century coincided with a questioning of the purpose and meaning of traditional definitions of poetry and of distinctions between poetry and prose. Numerous modernist poets wrote 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 methods. While there was a significant 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.

More recently, postmodernism fully embraces MacLeish's concept and tags boundaries between prose and poetry and 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, and to highlight the complex cultural web through which a poem is read. Poetry throughout the world today often reflects the incorporation of 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.

Basic elements

Prosody

Prosody is the study of the meter, rhythm, and intonation of a poem. Rhythm and meter, although closely related, should be distinguished. Meter is the abstract pattern established for a verse (such as iambic pentameter), while rhythm is the actual sound that results from a line of poetry. Thus, the meter of a line may be described as being "iambic", but a full description of the rhythm would require noting where the language causes one to pause or accelerate and how the meter interacts with other elements of the language. Prosody also may be used more specifically to refer to the scanning of poetic lines to show meter.

Methods of creating rhythm

See also Parallelism, inflection, intonation, foot

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 and Spanish. English, Russian and, generally, German are stress-timed languages. Varying intonation also affects how rhythm is perceived. Languages also can rely on either pitch, such as in Vedic or ancient Greek, or tone. Tonal languages include Chinese, Vietnamese, Norwegian, 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 and unstressed syllables (alone or elided). In the classical languages, on the other hand, while 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 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-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. 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. In Chinese poetry, tones as well as stresses create rhythm. Classical Chinese poetics identifies four tones: the level tone, rising tone, falling tone, and entering tone. Note that other classifications may have as many as eight tones for Chinese and six for Vietnamese.

The formal patterns of meter used developed 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 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. Jeffers experimented with sprung rhythm as an alternative to accentual rhythm.

Scanning meter

Meters in the Western poetic tradition are customarily grouped according to a characteristic metrical foot and the number of feet per line. For example, "iambic pentameter" is a meter composed of five feet per line in which the kind of feet called iambs predominate. The origin of this tradition of metrics lies in ancient Greek poetry, and poets such as Homer, Pindar, Hesiod, Sappho, and the great tragedians of Athens made use of such a metric system.

Meter is often scanned based on the arrangement of "poetic feet" into lines. In English, each foot usually includes one syllable with a stress and one or two without a stress. In other languages, it may be a combination of the number of syllables and the length of the vowel that determines how the foot is parsed. For example, in Greek, one syllable with a long unstressed vowel may be treated as the equivalent of two syllables with short vowels. In Anglo-Saxon meter, the unit on which lines are built is a half-line containing two stresses rather than a foot. 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 and lengths of syllables.

As an example of how a line of meter is defined, in English language iambic pentameter, each line has five metrical feet, and each foot is an iamb, or an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. When a particular line is scanned, there may be variations upon the basic pattern of the meter; for example, the first foot of English iambic pentameters is quite often inverted, meaning that the stress falls on the first syllable. The generally accepted names for some of the most commonly used kinds of feet include:

1. Aristotle's Poetics, Heath (ed) (1997), further discussed below.
2. See, for example, Kant's Critique of Judgment, discussed below.
3. Dylan Thomas, Quite Early One Morning, discussed below.
4. Many scholars, particularly those researching the Homeric tradition and the oral epics of the Balkans, suggest that early writing shows clear traces of older oral poetic traditions, including the use of repeated phrases as building blocks in larger poetic units. For one recent summary discussion, see Frederick Ahl, The Odyssey Re-Formed (1996). Others have suggested that the very earliest writing is primarily economic in nature, and that while oral poetry appears prevalent even in non-literate cultures, poetry need not necessarily predate writing. See, for example, Jack Goody, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (1987).
5. See Ahl (1996).
6. N.K. Sanders, "Introduction" to Gilgamesh 1960.
7. See, e.g., The Message, by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. (1982)
8. Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Dick Davis trans., Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (2006) ISBN 0670034851. Note that the Davis translation renders the Shahnameh into English prose rather than poetry, though the introduction includes an interesting discussion of the poetry and its history.
9. For example, in the Arabic world, considerable diplomatic speech was carried out in poetic form through the 16th century. See Trickster's Travel's, Natalie Zemon Davis (2006).
10. Poetry in political rhetoric includes the Gettysburg Address, which incorporates both rhythm and poetic diction. Examples of political invective include libel poetry and the classical epigrams of Martial and Catullus.
11. For example, many of Ibn Sina's medical texts were written in verse.
12. Aristotle's Poetics, Heath (ed) 1997.
13. Ibn Rushd wrote a commentary on Aristotle's Poetics, replacing the original examples with passages from Arabic poets. See for example, W. F. Bogges, 'Hermannus Alemannus' Latin Anthology of Arabic Poetry,' Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1968, Volume 88, 657-70, and Charles Burnett, 'Learned Knowledge of Arabic Poetry, Rhymed Prose, and Didactic Verse from Petrus Alfonsi to Petrarch', in Poetry and Philosophy in the Middle Ages: A Festschrift for Peter Dronke, 2001. ISBN 9004119647.
14. See, for example, Paul F Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. ISBN 0801880556 (for exapmle, page 239) for the prominence of Aristotle and the Poetics on the Renaissance curriculum.
15. Immanuel Kant (J.H. Bernard, trans.), Critique of Judgment (2005) at 131, for example, argues that the nature of poetry as a self-consciously abstract and beautiful form raises it to the highest level among the verbal arts, with tone or music following it, and only after that the more logical and narrative prose.
16. The Challenge of Keats; Christensen, A., Crisafulli-Jones, L., Galigani, G. and Johnson, A. (eds), 2000.
17. See, for example, Dylan Thomas's discussion of the poet as creator in Quite Early One Morning (1967).
18. The title of "Ars Poetica" alludes to Horace's commentary of the same title. The poem sets out a range of dicta for what poetry ought to be before concluding with its classic lines.
19. See, for example, the Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams or the works of Odysseus Elytis.
20. See, for example, T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."
21. See, Roland Barthes' essay "Death of the Author" in Image-Music-Text (1977).
22. Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry at 52.
23. See, for example, Julia Schülter, Rhythmic Grammar (2005).
24. See Yip, Tone (2002), which includes a number of maps showing the distribution of tonal languages.
25. Howell D. Chickering, Beowulf: a Dual-language Edition (1977)
26. See, for exmample, John Lazarus (trans.), Thirukkural (Original in Tamil with English Translation) by W.H. Drew (Translator), ISBN 8120604008
27. See, for example, Idiosyncracy and Technique, Marianne Moore (1966), or, for examples, William Carlos Williams, The Broken Span, New Directions (1941).
28. Robinson Jeffers, Selected Poems (1965).
29. Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, McGraw Hill, 1965, revised 1979. ISBN 0075536064.
30. Christine Brooke-Rose, A ZBC of Ezra Pound, Faber and Faber, 1971. ISBN 0-571-091350
31. The Sounds of Poetry, Robert Pinsky (1998), 11-24.
32. Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry