Poetry

Poetry is a literary art form in which people use the properties of words to convey ideas and stories. Poetry can be either oral or written, using the sounds and meanings of words to create linguistic art.

Poetry originated in ancient civilizations, predating literacy itself. In the Stone Age oral poetry began its roots in India, China, Persia, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Poetry was seen as a vocal performance, with travelling bards sharing their works with the world. Song and poetry were very connected arts; poetry was shared vocally for thousands of years. The oldest recorded poem is a love poem, over four thousand years old. This poem was written in Sumerian and begins, “Bridegroom, dear to my heart, Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet.” This poem was unearthed in Nippur, a region of Iraq, in 1880. The oldest epic poem is also from more than four thousand years old: The Epic of Gilgamesh, recorded in Babylon. It tells the story of a king named Gilgamesh who was half-man, half-god.

As civilizations grew, poetry began to become a more personal art. In Greece poems were sung and recited lyrically, drawing out the emotions. The word “lyric” comes from the Greek word lyre, the instrument used alongside poetry. In Japan, the haiku was invented: a poem with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five again in the third. The predecessors to the haiku, the uta, were used originally as a part of Shinto ceremonies as early as the 7th century but were soon integrated into the culture of Zen Buddhism. The haiku faded out of use, however, and did not regain popularity until the 17th century when Matsunaga Teitoku, the founder of the Teimon School, decided to promote the art of the haiku once again. He taught the classical poetry to one of his students, Matsuo Basho, who decided to live his life as a wandering poet and wrote over one thousand haiku. In Japan’s most famous literary work, Narrow Roads to the Interior, Basho wrote verse-poems such as:

The haiku would remain popular in Japan, but only spread to Europe and the Americas in the mid-20th century.

In the Western world poetry became popular through the form of sonnets during the late Middle Ages. Poetry was written in Europe throughout the Middle Ages—the Old English poem Beowulf dates to sometime between the eighth and 11th century—but most poetry written during this time was not as popular or moving as the sonnet. The form of the sonnet did not exist until the 13th or 14th century. Originating in Italy, this form of poetry has a strict rhyme and line scheme: there are fourteen lines of iambic pentameter in a sonnet with a rhyme scheme of either ABBA ABBA CDECDE or ABBA ABBA CDCDCD. One of the first masters of the sonnet was Francesco Petrarch. He wrote many poems to a woman named Laura in the 14th century. Through his many sonnets he developed the idea of figurative language and invented Petrarchan conceit, a comparison between a woman’s eyes and an object. Another popularizer of the sonnet was William Shakespeare. Shakespeare, famous for plays such as Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, produced a number of sonnets during the Renaissance period. Unlike in Petrarch’s sonnets, he used an ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme scheme and seemed to suggest in many of his romantic sonnets that romance does not need conceit to be true.

Contemporary poetry is much more loosely defined and conceptual than its older counterparts. Many new styles of poetry have been developed that are wildly different from more archaic forms of verse. Slam poetry is one such example. In 1984 a construction worker and poet named Marc Smith started a poetry reading series at a jazz club in Chicago. In 1986 he established a weekly poetry reading competition. Smith drew the name of the new type of poetry, “slam,” from both baseball and bridge terminology. By 1990 the first national slam competition was held in San Francisco. A new art form had been invented. Slam poetry allows the readers to vocally share highly personal and emotional works of art. Slam poetry also lets oppressed people take voice on serious issues such as racism.

Poetry uses many linguistic techniques to have a greater impact on the reader. The most obvious and visual of these techniques is the structure of the poem. The words in a poem are organized into lines, both to emphasize important words and phrases and to give pauses between thoughts. These lines also often determine the rhyme scheme of the piece, if it has one. In early oral poetry lines were used for slightly different reasons: to allow easier memorization and let the oral performer take a short break to breathe in air. The poem is also arranged into stanzas, the poetry equivalents of paragraphs. The stanzas are used like lines, but to a greater effect. Stanzas can be classified by the number of lines; for example, a stanza with two lines would be called a couplet, one with three lines would be called a tercet, one with four would be a quatrain, and so forth.

Rhythm is also important to the effect of the poem on the reader. Rhythm, by itself, is the patterns of stressed and unstressed beats, but is much more complex when paired with meter. Meter identifies units of the stressed and unstressed beats, such as an iamb (an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one). Iambic pentameter means there are five iambs in a line. A famous example of a simple line with iambic pentameter is “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?” from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Rhythm and meter are used to create a heartbeat and musicality in poetry. Also, like lines and stanzas, rhythm allows thoughts and phrases to be organized in ways that let people access the meaning of the poetry more fluently. Often rhyme is used alongside rhythm to emphasize the musicality of poems or to connect ideas further. Rhyme also make poems easier to remember and more pleasurable to read.

Some other techniques that writers use in poetry are repetition, alliteration, and imagery. Alliteration and repetition are often used to bring out the sounds of words or the potency of ideas. Repetition of symbols is common, because this allows the meanings of the symbols to be clearer in the reader’s mind. Alliteration is the repeating of sounds, especially consonants, at the beginning of words. An example of an alliterative phrase is “cutthroat claws.” Imagery can be used in many ways, but often help set the mood and develop the themes of a poem. Imagery is the picture the author creates using descriptive language. All senses can be used together to create this imagery. A very common use of imagery in poetry is to set the tone. For example, in a poem about despair the imagery might be bleak, dark, or cold.

The history of poetry is long and rich. Over thousands of years poets have developed many complex techniques to make their words have a greater impact on the reader. Poets today continue to innovate new ways to make their ideas heard.