The History of Poetry

Poetry from Yunani is poesis the meaning ‘making’ or creating’, has along history. Poetry as an art may out date literacy itself. In prehistoric and ancient societies, poetry was used as a way to record cultural events or tell stories. Poetry is amongst the earliest records of most cultures with poetic fragments found on monoliths(a geological feature such as a mountain, consisting of a single massive stone or rock), rune stones (typically a raised stone with a runic inscription, but the term can also be applied to inscriptions on builders on an bedrock ), and stelae.

The oldest surviving poem is the Epic of Gilgamesh,. The poem, based on the history of king Gilgamesh, was written around 3000 BC in Sumer, Mesopotamia in cuneiform script on clay tablets.

Ancient societies such as the Chinese Shi Jing developed canons of poetic works to ritual, as well as aesthetic, importance. Recently, intellectuals have sruggled to find a devenition that covers the entire pietic compass from the differences of haiku to Shakes pearean to slam poetry. Tatakiewicz, a Polish historian of aesthetics, wrote in The Concept of Poetry’’ poetry  expresses a certain state of mind.”

Aristoles poetics describes three genres of poetry

·         Epic     : is one of the oldest and widely popular poetic genies in the word. Epic is a traditional form of narrative poetry that portrays heroic deeds of great heroes in a war or adventure and the intervention of God and goodness on human life.

·         Comic  : are an art form that used moving images are not arranged in such a way as to form the fabric of the story.

·         Tragic  : is a form of a art based on human suffering that offers it’s audience pleasure.

Aristotles  work was highly influential throughout the Middle East During the Islamic Golden Age, then through Eroupe during the renaisence. Later, eastheticians describes poetry to have three major genres: epic, lyric, and dramatic, with dramatic holding the subcategories tragic and comedy. During early modern Western tradition, poets and eastheticians sought to distinguish poetry from prose by using the understanding that prose was written in a linear narrative form and used logical explication, while poetry was more abtract and beautiful.

Modern theorists rely less on opposing prose and poetry as to focusing on the poet as an artist. Intellectual disputes over the definition of poetry had erupted throughout the 20th century resulting in rejection of traditional forms and structures of poetry, coinciding  with questioning of traditional definitions of poetry and its distinction between prosa . more recently, post- modernists began to embrace the role of the reader and highlight the concept of poetry, incorporating its form from other culture and the last.

The Deluge tablet, carved in stone, of the Gilgamesh epic in Akkadian, circa 2nd millennium BC.

Poetry as an art form predates literacy. Some of the earliest poetry is believed to have been orally recited or sung. Following the development of writing, poetry has since developed into increasingly structured forms, though much poetry since the late 20th century has moved away from traditional forms towards the more vaguely defined free verse and prose poem formats.

Poetry was employed as a way of remembering oral history, story (epic poetry), genealogy, and law. Poetry is often closely related to musical traditions, and much of it can be attributed to religious movements. Many of the poems surviving from the ancient world are a form of recorded cultural information about the people of the past, and their poems are prayers or stories about religious subject matter, histories about their politics and wars, and the important organizing myths of their societies.

Poetry v Prose

Poetry-making is much older than writing. Although its origins have been lost to history and can never be known for certain, the widely-accepted theory is that poetry arose in early agricultural societies, where it was spoken or chanted as a spell to promote good harvests. Certainly it was a part of religious rites and ceremonies in ancient Greece and Rome, and was the vehicle used for handing down the stories of the people's struggles and triumphs.

One attempt at a definition of poetry is that it is written (or recited) in lines--that instead of running on as prose does, it breaks at certain points.  There is a suggestion of this definition in the original Latin words for prose and verse: prosus meant 'going straight forth' and versus meant 'returning'.  In verse there is a tendency to repetition (to 'return') and to variation.  Of course, if it is the sort of verse that conforms to an elaborate traditional pattern, it can scarcely be confused with prose.  Even then, though, there are no handy rules for telling whether it is good poetry or bad poetry, a point often emphasized by the regular emergence throughout history of poets who were at first scorned, and later celebrated or vice versa

Classical Period

The earliest known Western poetry consists of two acknowledged Greek masterpieces--the Iliad and the Odyssey. Both of these works are attributed to the legendary Homer, who is supposed to have been a blind wandering minstrel living in Greece in a period put at various times between the eleventh and seventh centuries B.C. The Iliad and the Odyssey are epics--that is, they are long narrative poems about the deeds of heroes. The Iliad tells of the siege of Troy and the Odyssey of Odysseus's (known to the Romans as Ulysses) wanderings after the siege and his journey home.

Cast of Sophocles

Photo courtesy of user.shakko@wikimedia.org.

The Greeks used poetry not only to celebrate their heroes but to instruct, to sing of love and to enrich their theatre through plays by such revered writers as Aeschylus (c. 525-456 B.C.), Sophocles (c. 497-405 B.C.) and Euripides (c. 485-406 B.C.).

Roman Poetry

From its beginning, Latin or Roman poetry was heavily influenced by the Greeks. In the middle of the third century B.C. the Latin poet Livius Andronicus made a translation of the Odyssey--the earliest Latin poetry of any significance surviving today. The first work of real independence however, was the Annals of Ennius (239-169 B.C.), an historical epic of which only fragments survive. Many Roman writers who came after him are still deeply admired. They include Lucretius who in the first century B.C. wrote On the Nature of Things, which has been called the West's greatest philosophical poem--and Virgil (c. 70-19 B.C.) who, among other works, wrote the celebrated national epic, the Aeneid.

Anonymous Portrait of Chaucer

Photo courtesy of wikimedia.org.

Medieval Period

The medieval period witnessed the emergence of a variety of poetry written in the vernacular. The epic masterpieces of the age included the Old English alliterative poem Beowulf, France's La Chanson de Roland and the Spanish Poema del Cid. There was also religious poetry, versified romance, and lyric poetry (literally poetry to be accompanied by a lyre, but also subjective poetry imbued with melody and feeling).

The great names among medieval poets included Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400), Saint Francis of Assisi (1181-1226), and the notable Parisian thief and brawler, Francois Villon (c. 1431-63).