Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor dates to approximately 2500 BCE and stands as the oldest surviving speculative fiction poem. This work predates the invention of cuneiform or hieroglyphs and utilized rhythmic speech to preserve vital societal information. Early poems functioned as essential mnemonic devices to store oral history, genealogy, and legal codes without written text.
The Epic of Gilgamesh was written in cuneiform script on clay tablets around the 3rd millennium BCE in Sumer. This monumental work later appeared on papyrus and tells the story of a king seeking immortality. The Deluge tablet carved in stone during the 2nd millennium BCE captures the Gilgamesh epic in Akkadian script.
The philosopher Plato defined poetry as a narrative genre separated into three types: the simple, the imitative, or a mix of the two. In book X of the Republic, Plato condemned poetry as evil, arguing that it created only deceptive copies of real-world corollaries. Aristotle countered this view in his Poetics by taxonomizing ancient Greek drama into epic, comic, and tragic subcategories.
Local oral artists, linguists, and historians accompanied their recitations with instruments such as the kora, the xalam, the mbira, and the djembe drum. These performances were integral to all aspects of pre-colonial African life and served political, educative, spiritual, and entertainment roles. The talking drum served as a distinct method of communication that depended on conveying meaning through non-musical grammatical, tonal, and rhythmic rules.
Lyric poetry was invented by Sir Robert Cite in 1789, allowing poets to create as many stanzas as they wanted. This form grew to be popular in around the 19th century and is known for being the quickest growing type of the past millennium. Modern poetry development is generally seen as having started at the beginning of the 20th century and extends into the 21st century.