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 other artistic effects. Most written poems are formatted in verse: a series or stack of lines on a page, which follow a rhythmic or other deliberate structure. 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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Some of Coleridge's contemporaries denounced the poem and questioned his story about its origin. It was not until years later that critics began to openly admire the poem. Most modern critics now view Kubla Khan as one of Coleridge's three great poems, with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. The poem is considered one of the most famous examples of Romanticism in English poetry. A copy of the manuscript is a permanent exhibit at the British Museum in London. (Full article...)
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Yeats was a very good friend of American expatriate poet and Bollingen Prize laureate Ezra Pound. Yeats wrote the introduction for Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali, which was published by the India Society. (Full article...)
Did you know (auto-generated) -
- ... that Canticle IV: The Journey of the Magi, a 1971 composition for three male solo voices and piano by Benjamin Britten, sets a T. S. Eliot poem to music?
- ... that Eyvindur P. Eiríksson has addressed modern alienation and man's relationship with nature through pagan poetry and a book about a fishing trawler?
- ... that Burton Raffel called Arthur Cooper's translation of a poem by Du Fu "exceedingly lame"?
- ... that Taylor Swift initially wrote "This Love" as a poem, turning it into a song only when she came up with a melody?
- ... that the seafaring poet D. I. Antoniou worked on a single poem for more than a decade and ended up publishing it over thirty years later?
- ... that The Waste Land, considered one of the most important poems of the 20th century, was described as "waste paper" when first published?
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| Beyond Seas by Sohrab Sepehri |
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I shall build a boat |
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