Short answers, pulled from the story.
Poetry comes from the Greek word poiesis, meaning "making." It is a form of literary art that uses the aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meanings beyond literal or surface-level meaning. A single instance is called a poem, and it is written by a poet.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest surviving epic poem, written in the Sumerian language and dating from the 3rd millennium BCE in Sumer, in present-day Iraq. It was written in cuneiform script on clay tablets and later on papyrus. The Istanbul tablet numbered 2461, from around 2000 BCE, has been labelled the world's oldest love poem.
Later aestheticians identified three major genres: epic poetry, lyric poetry, and dramatic poetry, treating comedy and tragedy as subgenres of dramatic poetry. Aristotle's Poetics had earlier described three genres as the epic, the comic, and the tragic. Other genres include narrative, satirical, elegiac, speculative, prose, light, and slam poetry.
Meter is the definitive pattern established for a verse, such as iambic pentameter, while rhythm is the actual sound that results from a line of poetry. Prosody is the study of the meter, rhythm, and intonation of a poem. The two are closely related but distinct.
A sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines following a set rhyme scheme and logical structure, standardized by the 13th century and crystallized under Petrarch in the 14th century. Sir Thomas Wyatt is credited with introducing the sonnet form into English literature, translating Petrarch's sonnets in the 16th century. Sonnets often use a volta, or turn, where an idea is reversed or a question answered.
Slam poetry originated in 1986 in Chicago, Illinois, when Marc Kelly Smith organized the first slam. Slam performers comment emotively, aloud before an audience, on personal, social, or other matters, focusing on word play, intonation, and voice inflection. It is often competitive, held at dedicated poetry slam contests.
In the 2020s, advances in large language models enabled the generation of poetry in specific styles and formats. A 2024 study found that machine-generated poems were rated by non-expert readers as more rhythmic, beautiful, and human-like than poems written by well-known human authors. Researchers suggested this preference may stem from the relative simplicity and accessibility of those poems.