Poetry: Definition types and History
Poetry (from the Latin Poeta, a poet) is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, it's apparent meaning.
Poetry may be written independently, as discrete poems, or may occur in conjunction with other arts, as in poetic drama, hymns, lyrics, or prose poetry. It's published in dedicated magazines, individual collections, and anthologies.
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Poetry and discussions of it have a long history. Early 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 rhyme, and emphasized the aesthetics of essays, and novels. From the mid-20th century, poetry has sometimes been more loosely defined as a fundamental creative using language.
Poetry often uses particular forms and conventions to suggest alternative meanings in the worlds or to evoke emotional or sensual 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 interrelations. Similarly, metaphor simile and metonymy create a resonance between otherwise disparate images a 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 forms of poetry are specific to particular culture and genres, responding to the characteristic of the language in which the poet writes while readers accustomed to identifying poetry with Dante, Goethe, Mickiewicz, and Rumi may think of it as being written in lines based upon rhyme and regular meter, there are traditions, such as Biblical poetry, that use other approaches to achieve rhythm and euphony.
Much of modern British and American poetry is to some extent a critique of poetic tradition, playing with and testing (among other things) the principle of euphony itself, to the extent that sometimes it deliberately does not rhyme or keep to set rhythms at all. In today's globalized world poets
often borrow styles, technique, and forms from diverse cultures and language.
History of poetry and literary theory
Poetry is an art form may predate literacy. Many ancient works, from the Indian Vedas (1700 -1200 BC) and Zoroaster's Gathas (1200-900 BC) to the Odyssey (800-645 BC), appear to have been composed in poetic form and aid memorization and oral transmission, in prehistoric and ancient societies. Poetry appears among the earliest records of most literate cultures with poetic fragments found and early monoliths, runestones, and stelae.
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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. Other Ancient Epic poetry included the Greek Epics 'Iliad and Odyssey', the Old Iranian Books the ' Gathic Avesta' and 'Yasna', the Roman National Epic, 'Virgil's Aeneid', and the Indian Epics Ramayana and Mahabharata.
The efforts of ancient thinkers and 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. 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 have struggled to find a definition that cloud encompasses formal differences as great as those between Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Matsuo Basho's Oku no Hosomichi as well as the difference in context spanning Tanakh religious poetry, love poetry, and rap.
Context can be critical to poetics and the development of poetic genres and forms. Poetry that records historic events in epics, such as Gilgamesh or Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, will necessarily be lengthy and narrative, while poetry used for the liturgical purpose (hymns, psalms, suras, and hadiths) is likely to have an inspirational tone, whereas elegy and tragedy are meant to evoke deep emotions. Other contexts include Gregorian chants, formal or diplomatic speech, political rhetoric and invective, light-hearted nursery and nonsense rhymes, and even medical texts.
The Polish Historian of aesthetics, Wladyslaw Tatariewicz in a paper on "The Concept of Poetry" traces the evolution of what is, in fact, two concepts of poetry. Tatarkiwicz points out that the term is applied to two distinct things that as the poet Paul Valery observed. "At a certain point find union. Poetry [….]is art on language. But poetry also has a more general meaning [….] that is difficult to define because it is less determinate: poetry expresses a certain state of mind.
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