Portal:Poetry

Welcome to the Poetry Portal

The first lines of the Iliad

Great Seal Script character for poetry, ancient China

Poetry (from the Greek word poiesis, "making") is a form of literary art that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, literal or surface-level meanings. Any particular instance of poetry is called a poem and is written by a poet. Poets use a variety of techniques called poetic devices, such as assonance, alliteration, euphony and cacophony, onomatopoeia, rhythm (via metre), and sound symbolism, to produce musical or incantatory effects. Most poems are formatted in verse: a series or stack of lines on a page, which follow a rhythmic or other deliberate pattern. For this reason, verse has also become a synonym (a metonym) for poetry.

Poetry has a long and varied history, evolving differentially across the globe. It dates back at least to prehistoric times with hunting poetry in Africa and to panegyric and elegiac court poetry of the empires of the Nile, Niger, and Volta River valleys. Some of the earliest written poetry in Africa occurs among the Pyramid Texts written during the 25th century BCE. The earliest surviving Western Asian epic poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, was written in the Sumerian language.

Early poems in the Eurasian continent evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing as well as from religious hymns (the Sanskrit Rigveda, the Zoroastrian Gathas, the Hurrian songs, and the Hebrew Psalms); or from a need to retell oral epics, as with the Egyptian Story of Sinuhe, Indian epic poetry, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. (Full article...)

Selected article

Kubla Khan /ˌkʊblə ˈkɑːn/ is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in 1816. According to Coleridge's Preface to Kubla Khan, the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium-influenced dream after reading a work describing Xanadu, the summer palace of the Mongol ruler and Emperor of China Kublai Khan. Upon waking, he set about writing lines of poetry that came to him from the dream until he was interrupted by "a person on business from Porlock". The poem could not be completed according to its original 200–300 line plan as the interruption caused him to forget the lines. He left it unpublished and kept it for private readings for his friends until 1816 when, on the prompting by George Gordon Byron, it was published.

Some of Coleridge's contemporaries denounced the poem and questioned his story about its origin. It was not until years later that critics began to openly admire the poem. Most modern critics now view Kubla Khan as one of Coleridge's three great poems, with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. The poem is considered one of the most famous examples of Romanticism in English poetry. A copy of the manuscript is a permanent exhibit at the British Museum in London. (Full article...)

Selected image

Bust of Sappho (Roman copy of an ancient Greek original)

image credit: Marie-Lan Nguyen

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Selected biography

Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e e cummings (in the style of some of his poems—see name and capitalization, below), was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. His body of work encompasses approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays and several essays, as well as numerous drawings and paintings. He is remembered as an eminent voice of 20th century English literature.

Despite Cummings's familiarity with avant-garde styles (undoubtedly affected by the Calligrammes of Apollinaire, according to a contemporary observation , much of his work is quite traditional. Many of his poems are sonnets, albeit often with a modern twist, and he occasionally made use of the blues form and acrostics. Cummings' poetry often deals with themes of love and nature, as well as the relationship of the individual to the masses and to the world. His poems are also often rife with satire. (Full article...)

Did you know (auto-generated) -

• ... that the fall of Sundrum Castle was alluded to in a poem by Robert Chambers in the 19th century and was later referred to as a curse?
• ... that Benjamin Britten composed Canticle I: My beloved is mine and I am his for the tenor voice of Peter Pears, using poetry from A Divine Rapture by Francis Quarles?
• ... that for the morning song "Die güldne Sonne voll Freud und Wonne", the poet found a new metre, and the composer a new melody, to reflect the many meanings of "rising"?
• ... that the "Poetic Essay of the Great Bliss of the Sexual Union of Heaven and Earth and Yin and Yang" argues that heterosexual sex is the "ultimate human pleasure", but affirms homosexuality as well?
• ... that Polish Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski – considered "the founding father of Polish literature" – wrote threnodies, the first Polish-language tragedy, and epigrams?
• ... that after civil rights activist Andrew Goodman was murdered, Mary Doyle Curran found and published a poem that Goodman had written for her class?

Selected poem

Clouds will separate us by Matsuo Basho
Clouds will separate us — the time to part has come now. Wild goose flies away...

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