From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A poet is a person who writes poetry. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages and have produced works that vary greatly in different cultures and time periods. [1] The unknown poet or poets of the epic poem The Epic of Gilgamesh is the creator of what many scholars believe is the oldest surviving work of poetry.[2] Religious texts such as the Torah contain early poems such as the prologue to Book of Job[3], and mythological texts such as Homer's The Odyssey existed in the Ancient Greek language as early as 750 BC.[4] In Chinese culture, the earliest collection of poems is the Shijing, a collection of 305 poems by various authors thought to have been written as early as 1000 BC.[5] Throughout each civilization and language, poets have used various styles that have changed through the course of literary history, resulting in a history of poets as diverse as the literature they have produced.
Famous French poet Arthur Rimbaud summarized the "poet" by saying:
A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen![6]
[edit] Etymology
From the ancient Greek : ποιέω, poieō : "I make or compose" ; ποιητης, poïêtes : "artisan, creator, maker (also makar), author, poet" > Latin : poēta : "poet, author" > Old French : (1200-1400) poëte or poète > Used (poet) in 14th. century, in classical English language, for all sorts of writers or composers of works of literature. The term makar, which is another older term for poet, is a calque from the Greek.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Orban, Clara Elizabeth.The Culture of Fragments:Word and Images in Futurism and Surrealism.Rodopi (1997)p.3
- ^ Damrosch,David. The Buried Book. Macmillan (2007) pp.3-5
- ^ von Goethe,Johann Wolfgang.Faust, a Dramatic poem, tr. into Engl. prose with notes by the translator of Savigny's 'Of the Vocation of our Age for Legislation. Oxford University Press (1855)p.M2
- ^ Sweet, Waldo E. et Erich Segal.Sport and Recreation in Ancient Greece: a Sourcebook with Translations. Oxford University Press US (1987) p.11
- ^ Zong-qi Cai. How to read Chinese poetry: A Guided Anthology. Columbia University Press (2008)p.13
- ^ Rimbaud, Arthur. in Illuminations, and Other Prose Poems ed. Louise Varèse New Directions Publishing (1957) p.xxx
