Short answers, pulled from the story.
The oldest surviving epic poem is the Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates from the 3rd millennium BCE in Sumer, located in present-day Iraq. It was written in cuneiform script on clay tablets and later on papyrus.
The Istanbul tablet numbered 2461, dating to around 2000 BCE, is considered by some scholars to be the world's oldest love poem. It describes an annual rite in which a king symbolically married the goddess Inanna to ensure fertility and prosperity.
In his Poetics, Aristotle divided ancient Greek drama, which he called poetry, into three subcategories: epic, comic, and tragic. He developed rules for each genre based on its underlying purposes, and his work influenced thought across the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age and in Europe during the Renaissance.
The Classic of Poetry, known as the Shijing or Odes, is the earliest surviving collection of Chinese poems and songs, containing 305 pieces dating from the 11th to the 7th century BCE. It is one of the official Confucian classics, and the philosopher Confucius valued it highly; his remarks on the collection became an important source in ancient music theory.
Major American practitioners of modern poetry writing in English include T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Maya Angelou, June Jordan, Allen Ginsberg, and Nobel laureate Louise Gluck. Modern epic poets include Ezra Pound, H.D., Derek Walcott, and Giannina Braschi, while Joy Harjo, Kevin Young, and Natasha Trethewey are contemporary lyric poets.
Griots were oral artists who performed court poetry in African cultures, with the Epic of Sundiata being one of the best-known examples of griot court poetry. Performance poetry in Africa was part of theatrical traditions present in political, educational, spiritual, and entertainment contexts throughout pre-colonial African life.