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Poetry (a term derived from the Greek word poiesis, "making"), also called verse, 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 meaning.
- History of Poetry
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- History of Poetry
- Overview
- Attempts to define poetry
poetry, literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm.
(Read Britannica’s biography of this author, Howard Nemerov.)
Poetry is the other way of using language. Perhaps in some hypothetical beginning of things it was the only way of using language or simply was language tout court, prose being the derivative and younger rival. Both poetry and language are fashionably thought to have belonged to ritual in early agricultural societies; and poetry in particular, it has been claimed, arose at first in the form of magical spells recited to ensure a good harvest. Whatever the truth of this hypothesis, it blurs a useful distinction: by the time there begins to be a separate class of objects called poems, recognizable as such, these objects are no longer much regarded for their possible yam-growing properties, and such magic as they may be thought capable of has retired to do its business upon the human spirit and not directly upon the natural world outside.
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Famous Poets and Poetic Form
Formally, poetry is recognizable by its greater dependence on at least one more parameter, the line, than appears in prose composition. This changes its appearance on the page; and it seems clear that people take their cue from this changed appearance, reading poetry aloud in a very different voice from their habitual voice, possibly because, as Ben Jonson said, poetry “speaketh somewhat above a mortal mouth.” If, as a test of this description, people are shown poems printed as prose, it most often turns out that they will read the result as prose simply because it looks that way; which is to say that they are no longer guided in their reading by the balance and shift of the line in relation to the breath as well as the syntax.
That is a minimal definition but perhaps not altogether uninformative. It may be all that ought to be attempted in the way of a definition: Poetry is the way it is because it looks that way, and it looks that way because it sounds that way and vice versa.
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Poetry is written, spoken or sung language that is used in stronger or more original ways than prose is used. Poetry uses the meanings of words as prose does; but it also uses the sounds of words as if they were music, especially rhymes, other repeating sounds, and rhythms (beats or meters).
The meaning of POETRY is metrical writing : verse. How to use poetry in a sentence.
Jul 18, 2019 · Perhaps the characteristic most central to the definition of poetry is its unwillingness to be defined, labeled, or nailed down. Poetry is the chiseled marble of language. It is a paint-spattered canvas, but the poet uses words instead of paint, and the canvas is you.
An inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language; an experience through words. Jorge Luis Borges believed that “poetry is something that cannot be defined without oversimplifying it. It would be like attempting to define the color yellow, love, the fall of leaves in autumn.”
