History of poetry
Poetry as an oral art form likely predates written text. The earliest poetry is believed to have been recited or sung, employed as a way of remembering oral history, genealogy, and law. Many of the poems surviving from the ancient world are recorded prayers, or stories about religious subject matter, but they also include historical accounts, instructions for everyday activities, love songs, and fiction. Some scholars believe that the art of poetry may predate literacy, and developed from folk epics and other oral genres. Others suggest that poetry did not necessarily predate writing.
A rhythmic and repetitious form would make a long story easier to remember and retell before writing was available as a reminder. Thus, to aid memorization and oral transmission, surviving works from prehistoric and ancient societies appear to have been first composed in a poetic form. This approach extends from the Vedas dated between 1500 and 1000 BCE to the Odyssey dated between 800 and 675 BCE. Early writing shows clear traces of older oral traditions, including the use of repeated phrases as building blocks in larger poetic units.
The oldest surviving epic poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, dates from the 3rd millennium BCE in Sumer. It was written in cuneiform script on clay tablets and later on papyrus. The Istanbul tablet number 2461, dating to 2000 BCE, describes an annual rite in which the king symbolically married and mated with the goddess Inanna to ensure fertility and prosperity. Some have labelled it the world's oldest love poem. An example of Egyptian epic poetry is The Story of Sinuhe from around 1800 BCE.
Other ancient epics include the Greek Iliad and the Odyssey, the Persian Avestan books known as the Yasna, and the Roman national epic Virgil's Aeneid written between 29 and 19 BCE. The Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata also stand among these early works. Other forms of poetry include such ancient collections of religious hymns as the Indian Sanskrit-language Rigveda, the Avestan Gathas, the Hurrian songs, and the Hebrew Psalms. These possibly developed directly from folk songs. The earliest entries in the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry, the Classic of Poetry Shijing, were initially lyrics.
In Africa, poetry has a history dating back to prehistorical times with the creation of hunting poetry. Panegyric and elegiac court poetry were developed extensively throughout the history of the empires of the Nile, Niger, and Volta river valleys. Some of the earliest written poetry in Africa can be found among the Pyramid Texts written during the 25th century. The Epic of Sundiata stands out as one of the most well-known examples of griot court poetry.
Performance poetry is traditionally a part of theatrics which was present in all aspects of pre-colonial African life. Their theatrical ceremonies had many different functions including political, educative, spiritual and entertainment roles. Poetics were an element of theatrical performances of local oral artists, linguists and historians. They accompanied their work with local instruments such as the kora, the xalam, the mbira and the djembe drum. Drumming for accompaniment is not to be confused with performances of the talking drum since it is a distinct method of communication that depends on conveying meaning through non-musical grammatical tonal and rhythmic rules imitating speech.
Classical thinkers employed classification as a way to define and assess the quality of poetry. In book III of the Republic Plato defined poetry as a narrative genre separated into three types: the simple, the imitative, or some mix of the two. He also famously in book X condemned poetry as evil being only capable of creating deceptive and ineffectual copies of real-world corollaries. Aristotle taxonomized ancient Greek drama known as poetry into three subcategories: epic comic and tragic.
Aristotle developed rules to distinguish the highest-quality poetry of each genre based on the underlying purposes of that genre. Later aestheticians identified three major genres: Epic poetry lyric poetry and dramatic poetry treating comedy and tragedy as subgenres of dramatic poetry. Aristotle's work was influential throughout the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age as well as in Europe during the Renaissance. Like Aristotle subsequent poets and aestheticians often distinguished poetry from prose which was generally understood as writing with a proclivity to logical explication and global trade.
Poetry took numerous forms in medieval Europe including lyric and epic poetry. The troubadours trouvères and minnesänger are known for composing their lyric poetry about courtly love usually accompanied by an instrument. Old English religious poetry includes the poem Christ by Cynewulf and the poem The Dream of the Rood preserved in both manuscript form and on the Ruthwell Cross. We do have some secular poetry since a great deal of medieval literature was written in verse including the Old English epic Beowulf.
Scholars are fairly sure based on fragments and references in historic texts that much lost secular poetry was set to music and spread by traveling minstrels or bards across Europe. Thus the few poems written eventually became ballads or lays and never made it to being recited without song or other music. In medieval Latin while verse in old quantitative meters continued to be written a new more popular form called the sequence arose which was based on accentual metres where metrical feet were based on stressed syllables rather than vowel length. These metres were associated with Christian hymnody.
Lyric poetry grew to be popular in around the 19th century with the addition of radio as they could broadcast to the world the earliest songs although radio wasn't actually widely popular until well into the 20th century. Lyric poetry is very similar to songs or song lyrics. They could have as many stanzas as they wanted which was different to different forms of poetry at the time. There were no real regulations to this new form of poetry invented by Sir Robert Cite in 1789.
This form of poetry is known for being the quickest growing type of the past millennium. To this day lyric poetry is the most used and important of poetries and is used throughout the world. The Classic of Poetry often known by its original name of the Odes or Poetry is the earliest existing collection of Chinese poems and songs. This poetry collection comprises 305 poems and songs dating from the 11th to the 7th century. The stylistic development of Classical Chinese poetry consists of both literary and oral cultural processes conventionally assigned to certain standard periods or eras corresponding with Chinese Dynastic Eras.
The development of modern poetry is generally seen as having started at the beginning of the 20th century and extends into the 21st century. Among its major American practitioners who write in English are T.S. Eliot Robert Frost Wallace Stevens Maya Angelou June Jordan Allen Ginsberg and Nobel laureate Louise Glück. Among the modern epic poets are Ezra Pound H.D. Derek Walcott and Giannina Braschi. Contemporary poets Joy Harjo Kevin Young and Natasha Trethewey write poetry in the lyric form.
Some of these poems seem to have been preserved in written form. Generally the folk type of poems they are anonymous and may show signs of having been edited or polished in the process of fixing them in written characters. Besides the Classic of Poetry another early text is the Songs of the South although some individual pieces or fragments survive in other forms embedded in classical histories or other literature. The efforts of ancient thinkers to determine what makes poetry distinctive resulted in poetics the study of the aesthetics of poetry.
Common questions
When did the History of poetry begin as an oral art form?
The History of poetry began as an oral art form before written text existed. The earliest poetry was recited or sung to remember oral history, genealogy, and law.
What is the oldest surviving epic poem in the History of poetry?
The Epic of Gilgamesh dates from the 3rd millennium BCE in Sumer. It was written in cuneiform script on clay tablets and later on papyrus.
Who defined poetry as a narrative genre separated into three types in the History of poetry?
Plato defined poetry as a narrative genre separated into three types: the simple, the imitative, or some mix of the two. He also famously condemned poetry as evil being only capable of creating deceptive and ineffectual copies of real-world corollaries.
Which collection contains the earliest existing Chinese poems in the History of poetry?
The Classic of Poetry often known by its original name of the Odes or Poetry is the earliest existing collection of Chinese poems and songs. This poetry collection comprises 305 poems and songs dating from the 11th to the 7th century.
When did modern poetry start in the History of poetry?
The development of modern poetry is generally seen as having started at the beginning of the 20th century and extends into the 21st century. Among its major American practitioners who write in English are T.S. Eliot Robert Frost Wallace Stevens Maya Angelou June Jordan Allen Ginsberg and Nobel laureate Louise Glück.