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— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Poetry

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  • Poetry takes its name from the Greek word poiesis, meaning "making." That single root reaches back across thousands of years, to clay tablets pressed in cuneiform and to hunting chants in Africa that may have come before anyone could write. A poem can claim, "I killed my enemy in Reno," and the killer is not the poet but a character called the speaker, a voice the author invents. This gap between the writer and the "I" on the page is one of poetry's oldest tricks. How does language stop being plain information and start producing music? Why do Dante, Goethe, Mickiewicz, and Rumi feel like poets, while a traditional Somali poem with no written form belongs to the same art? What rules hold a sonnet together, and what happens when poets decide to break them all? The answers run from the empires of the Nile, Niger, and Volta River valleys to a 2024 study that rated machine-made poems above the work of famous human authors.

  • 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. Scribes cut it into clay tablets in cuneiform script, and later versions appeared on papyrus. One artifact pushes the love poem even further back. The Istanbul tablet numbered 2461, from around 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 called it the world's oldest love poem.

    The Pyramid Texts, written during the 25th century BCE, hold some of the earliest written poetry in Africa. Egyptian epic survives too, in The Story of Sinuhe from around 1800 BCE. Across Eurasia, ancient peoples set down religious hymns that may have grown straight out of folk song. The list includes the Sanskrit Rigveda, the Avestan Gathas, the Hurrian songs, and the Hebrew Psalms. The Classic of Poetry, known as the Shijing, gathered Chinese poems and folk songs that began as lyrics. The philosopher Confucius prized the Shijing, and it became one of the official Confucian classics. His remarks on it survive as a source for ancient music theory. Scholars once believed the earliest stressed poetry came from Romanos the Melodist, who flourished in the 6th century CE, until Tim Whitmarsh pointed to an inscribed Greek poem that predated his work.

  • Aristotle's Poetics tried to pin poetry down by sorting it into three genres: the epic, the comic, and the tragic. He built rules to mark the highest-quality work in each, judging by the purpose he believed each genre served. Later aestheticians settled on three major kinds, epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry, treating comedy and tragedy as subgenres of the dramatic. Aristotle's ideas spread through the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age and through Europe during the Renaissance.

    John Keats gave a name to poetry's escape from logic. He called it "negative capability," the idea that a poem renders the beautiful or the sublime without carrying the burden of linear narrative or logical explication. This romantic view treated form as the heart of good poetry, because form stays abstract and separate from underlying meaning. It held influence well into the 20th century.

    Modernist poets pulled the definition apart. Some refused to distinguish between making a poem with words and creative acts in other media, while others called the whole effort to define poetry misguided. Postmodernism then shifted attention to the reader, to hermeneutics, and to the cultural web around a text. The literary critic Geoffrey Hartman, who lived from 1929 to 2016, named the modern unease "the anxiety of demand," a fear that the fact no longer has a form. He drew on Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had urged poets to "Ask the fact for the form." Harold Bloom, who lived from 1930 to 2019, said the poets ready to write the major American verse of the twenty-first century might be seen as what Stevens called "a great shadow's last embellishment," the shadow being Emerson's.

  • Prosody is the study of meter, rhythm, and intonation. Meter is the fixed pattern set for a verse, such as iambic pentameter, while rhythm is the actual sound a line produces. The two are close cousins, but they are not the same thing. Languages build rhythm in strikingly different ways. Japanese is a mora-timed language. Latin, Catalan, French, Leonese, Galician, and Spanish are syllable-timed. English, Russian, and generally German are stress-timed. Some languages lean on pitch, like Vedic Sanskrit and Ancient Greek, while tonal languages include Chinese, Vietnamese, and most Subsaharan languages.

    Ancient Hebrew Biblical poetry leaned on parallelism rather than metrical feet. Successive lines mirrored one another in grammar, sound, meaning, or all three, which made the verse suited to antiphonal call-and-response. Classical Chinese poetics, built on the tone system of Middle Chinese, sorted tones into two kinds: the level tone and the oblique tones, which gathered the rising, departing, and entering tones. Certain forms dictated which syllables had to be level and which oblique. The Venpa of the Tamil language carried grammar so rigid it could be expressed as a context-free grammar.

    Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams rejected the claim that regular accentual meter is essential to English poetry. Jeffers went further and experimented with sprung rhythm as an alternative. Vladimir Nabokov noticed a second pattern of accents riding on top of the regular stresses, born from the natural pitch of spoken words, and proposed the term "scud" for an unaccented stress.

  • Iambic pentameter packs five feet into a line, with the iamb dominating, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, as in des-cribe or in-clude. The metric system came from ancient Greek poetry and ran through poets such as Pindar and Sappho and the great tragedians of Athens. Dactylic hexameter, six feet per line led by the dactyl, was the traditional meter of Greek epic, surviving earliest in Homer and Hesiod. William Shakespeare later worked in iambic pentameter, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in dactylic hexameter.

    The trochee reverses the iamb, a stressed syllable then an unstressed one, as in pic-ture or flow-er. The dactyl carries one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed, the anapaest two unstressed before one stressed, the spondee two stressed together, and the rare pyrrhic two unstressed together. The names run all the way up to the choriamb, a four-syllable foot drawn from ancient Greek and Latin verse. Each foot has its own feel. The iamb is the most natural rhythm in English and produces a subtle but stable verse.

    Robert Pinsky argued that English dactylic verse uses dactyls so irregularly that it is better described through iambs and anapests, feet he considers natural to the language. Different traditions favor different meters. Edgar Allan Poe wrote "The Raven" in trochaic octameter. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow set The Song of Hiawatha in trochaic tetrameter, the same meter as the Finnish national epic, The Kalevala, which matches the natural rhythm of Finnish and Estonian. Sanskrit poetry organizes itself by chhandas, a system that still shapes several South Asian languages.

  • Chaucer used heavy alliteration to mock Old English verse and to paint a character as archaic. Rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and consonance all build repeating patterns of sound, working as structure, as reinforcement of rhythm, or as ornament. Italian carries a rich rhyming structure, with regular word endings that let a long poem hold a limited set of rhymes throughout. English, stocked with irregular endings borrowed from other languages, is poorer in rhyme. That richness shapes which forms a language tends to use.

    Alliteration and assonance structured early Germanic, Norse, and Old English poetry. In those traditions the metrical pattern told the listener exactly when to expect the next alliteration, weaving sound into the skeleton of the verse. Assonance filled skaldic poetry and reaches back to the Homeric epic, and because English verbs carry much of the pitch, it can loosely echo the tonal qualities of Chinese poetry. Consonance repeats a consonant through a sentence without anchoring it to the front of words, a subtler effect than alliteration.

    Classical Greek and Latin poetry used no rhyme at all. Rhyme entered European poetry in the High Middle Ages through the influence of Arabic in Al Andalus. Arabic poets had used it heavily, both in literary Arabic from the sixth century and in older oral works like their long, rhyming qasidas. Rhyme schemes get mapped with letters, so a quatrain whose first, second, and fourth lines rhyme while the third does not is an AABA scheme, the pattern of the rubaiyat. An enclosed ABBA quatrain belongs to the Petrarchan sonnet, and more tangled schemes earned their own names, like ottava rima and terza rima.

  • Sir Thomas Wyatt is credited with introducing the sonnet into English literature, translating Petrarch's sonnets in the 16th century. The form had become fourteen lines with a set rhyme scheme by the 13th century, then crystallized under Petrarch in the 14th. The English or Shakespearean sonnet adds a third quatrain and a closing couplet. At its heart sits the volta, a turn where an idea flips, a question is answered, or the subject grows more complicated, often arriving as a contradicting "but." Poets stretched the sonnet across politics, theology, war, and gender, while Ted Berrigan and John Berryman wrote sequences that drop rhyme, logic, or even the count of fourteen lines.

    Shi is the main type of Classical Chinese poetry, and within it rhyming is always required. Its variations include the folk-ballad yuefu, the old-style gushi, and the modern-style jintishi, whose theoretical basis was laid by Shen Yue, who lived from 441 to 513 CE. Li Bai, from 701 to 762 CE, mastered the gushi. Du Fu, from 712 to 770 CE, mastered the jintishi during the Tang Dynasty. Japanese tanka runs five sections in a 5-7-5-7-7 pattern of on, written as early as the Asuka period by poets like Kakinomoto no Hitomaro. Haiku evolved in the 17th century from the hokku, holding three sections in a 5-7-5 pattern with a cutting word and a season-word, and its most famous exponent was Matsuo Bashō, who lived from 1644 to 1694.

    The villanelle stretches to nineteen lines, five triplets and a closing quatrain bound by two refrains, used by Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop. The Thai khlong demands tone markings, mai ek and mai tho, on certain syllables, a relic of a time when Thai had three tones rather than today's five. The ghazal, common in Arabic, Bengali, Persian, and Urdu, runs five to fifteen rhyming couplets sharing a refrain and often turns on unattainable love or divinity. Its masters include Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, his master Attar, and Hafez, whose ghazals shaped post-fourteenth-century Persian writing more than any other author and inspired Goethe's West-östlicher Diwan.

  • Narrative poetry may be the oldest type of poetry, and many scholars believe Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were stitched together from shorter narrative poems about single episodes. Meter, alliteration, and kennings may have once worked as memory aids for bards reciting from a preliterate oral tradition. Lyric poetry, by contrast, tells no story; it turns inward to the poet's own feelings and perceptions, and its practitioners include Hafez, John Donne, Charles Baudelaire, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Epic recounts the deeds of heroic or mythological figures, and Derek Walcott won a Nobel prize in 1992 largely on the strength of his epic Omeros.

    John Dryden, the first Poet Laureate, produced Mac Flecknoe in 1682, subtitled "A Satire on the True Blue Protestant Poet, T.S.," aimed at Thomas Shadwell. Edgar Allan Poe is sometimes called the father of speculative poetry, and his 1848 essay Eureka: A Prose Poem anticipated the Big Bang theory of the universe's origin by three-quarters of a century. Slam poetry began in 1986 in Chicago, Illinois, when Marc Kelly Smith organized the first slam. The poetics collective OBJECT:PARADISE coined the term language happenings in 2018 for events that treat poetry less as a literary genre and more as a live linguistic act.

    In the 2020s, large language models reached far enough to generate poetry in specific styles and formats. A 2024 study found that non-expert readers rated machine-made poems as more rhythmic, beautiful, and human-like than poems by well-known human authors. Researchers suggested the preference may come from the relative simplicity and accessibility of those poems, which some participants found easier to understand. Three thousand years after a scribe pressed the Inanna rite into the Istanbul tablet, the act of "making" that gave poetry its name had found a maker no one expected.

Common questions

What does the word poetry mean and where does it come from?

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.

What is the oldest surviving poem in the world?

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.

What are the main genres of poetry?

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.

What is the difference between meter and rhythm in 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.

What is a sonnet and who introduced it into English?

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.

When did slam poetry begin?

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.

Can artificial intelligence write poetry?

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.

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All sources

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  179. 179A Brief Guide to Slam Poetry
  180. 1805 Tips on Spoken Word
  181. 181BookVoicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the PresentLesley Wheeler — Cornell University Press — 2008
  182. 182JournalInstantní NostalgieFernanda Seavon — March 2022
  183. 183BookA Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama: Volume 3 Beyond BroadwayChristopher W. Bigsby — Cambridge University Press — 1985
  184. 184Object Paradise, el colectivo artístico que quiere devolver la vida y la voz al barrio de ŽižkovCristina Gironès — 16 February 2022
  185. 185Journalobtydeník živé literaturyJuly 2022