Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, its apparent meaning. Poetry may be written independently, or may occur in conjunction with other arts, as in poetic drama, lyrics or prose poetry.
Poetry, and discussions of it, have a long history.
Early attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric, drama. Later attempts concentrated on features such as repetition, verse form and rhyme, and emphasized the aesthetics which distinguish poetry from prose.
From the mid 20th century, poetry has sometimes been more loosely defined as a fundamental creative act using language.
Poetry often uses particular forms and conventions to suggest alternative meanings in the words.
Devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhythm are sometimes used to achieve musical or incantatory effects. The use of ambiguity, irony and other stylistic elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations. Similarly, metaphor, simile and metonymy create a resonance between otherwise disparate images forming connections previously not perceived.
Kindred forms of resonance may exist, between individual verses, in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm.
Some forms of poetry are specific to particular cultures and genres, responding to the characteristics of the language in which the poet writes, readers accustomed to identifying poetry with Dante, Goethe, Mickiewicz and Rumi may think of it as being written in rhyming lines and regular meter, there are traditions, such as Biblical poetry, that use other approaches to achieve rhythm and euphony.
Much of modern British and American poetry is to some extent a critique of poetic tradition, playing with and testing the principle of euphony itself, to the extent that sometimes it deliberately does not rhyme or keep to set rhythms at all.
Poets often borrow styles, techniques and forms from diverse cultures and languages.
The beauty, the power and the effect of a poem rarely depend on styles, technique and forms solely. The essential elements, like rhythm, rhyme are only a framework of a poem, and none of these are as important as the topic and especially the choice of words.
Great poems differ from others exactly because of these, because their words invoke thoughts and powerful feelings in the listener or reader. Some poets, like the Hungarian, wrote exceptional poems with words combined in sentences that achieve meaning greater than the sum of the meanings of the words. Some of these became sayings in the everyday language. Across time and cultures the meaning of the words change, the original beauty and power of poems.
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