History of poetry

Poetry as an art form that may have predated 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 19th 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 as an art form may predate literacy [Many scholars, particularly those researching the Homeric tradition and the oral epics of the Balkans, suggest that early writing shows clear traces of older oral poetic traditions, including the use of repeated phrases as building blocks in larger poetic units. A rhythmic and repetitious form would make a long story easier to remember and retell, before writing was available as an aide-memoire.] Thus many ancient works, from the Vedas (1700 - 1200 BC) to the "Odyssey" (800 - 675 BC), appear to have been composed in poetic form to aid memorization and oral transmission, in prehistoric and ancient societies [For one recent summary discussion, see Frederick Ahl, "The Odyssey Re-Formed" (1996). Others suggest that poetry did not necessarily predate writing. See, for example, Jack Goody, "The Interface Between the Written and the Oral" (1987).] . Poetry appears among the earliest records of most literate cultures, with poetic fragments found on early monoliths, runestones and stelae.

The oldest surviving poem is the "Epic of Gilgamesh", from the 3rd millennium BC in Sumer (in Iraq/Mesopotamia), which was written in cuneiform script on clay tablets and, later, papyrus. [N.K. Sanders, "Introduction" to "Gilgamesh" (1960).] The "Epic of Gilgamesh" is based on the historical king Gilgamesh. The oldest love poem, found on a clay tablet now known as "Istanbul #2461", was also a Sumerian poem. It was recited by a bride of the Sumerian king Shu-Sin, who ruled from 2037-2029 BC. ["Guinness World Records 2007". Guinness World Records Limited, 2006.] The oldest epic poetry besides the "Epic of Gilgamesh" are the Greek epics "Iliad" and "Odyssey" and the Indian Sanskrit epics "Ramayana" and "Mahabharata". The longest epic poems ever written were the "Mahabharata" and the Tibetan "Epic of King Gesar".

Ancient thinkers sought to determine what makes poetry distinctive as a form and what distinguishes good poetry from bad, resulting in the development of "poetics", or the study of the aesthetics of poetry. Some ancient societies, such as the Chinese through the Shi Jing, one of the Five Classics of Confucianism, developed canons of poetic works that had ritual as well as aesthetic importance. More recently, thinkers struggled to find a definition that could encompass formal differences as great as those between Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" and Matsuo Bashō's Oku no Hosomichi, as well as differences in context that span from the religious poetry of the Tanakh to love poetry to rap.

Context can be critical to poetics and to the development of poetic genres and forms. For example, poetry employed to record historical events in epics, such as "Gilgamesh" or Ferdowsi's "Shahnameh", [Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Dick Davis trans., "Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings" (2006) ISBN 0-670-03485-1] will necessarily be lengthy and narrative, while poetry used for liturgical purposes in hymns, psalms, suras and hadiths is likely to have an inspirational tone, whereas elegies and tragedy are intended to invoke deep internal emotional responses. Other contexts include music such as Gregorian chants, formal or diplomatic speech, [ For example, in the Arabic world, much diplomacy was carried out through poetic form in the 16th century. See "Trickster's Travel's", Natalie Zemon Davis (2006).] political rhetoric and invective, [ Examples of political invective include libel poetry and the classical epigrams of Martial and Catullus.] light-hearted nursery and nonsense rhymes, and even medical texts. [For example, many of Ibn Sina's medical texts were written in verse.]

The Polish historian of aesthetics, Władysław Tatarkiewicz, in a paper on "The Concept of Poetry," traces the evolution of what is in fact "two concepts of poetry". Tatarkiewicz points out that the term is applied to two distinct things that, as the poet Paul Valéry observes, "at a certain point find union. Poetry [...] is an art based on "language." But poetry also has a more general meaning [...] that is difficult to define because it is less determinate: poetry expresses a certain "state of mind."

Classical and early modern Western traditions

Classical thinkers employed classification as a way to define and assess the quality of poetry. Notably, Aristotle's "Poetics" describes the three genres of poetry: the epic, comic, and tragic, and develops rules to distinguish the highest-quality poetry of each genre, based on the underlying purposes of that genre. ["Aristotle's Poetics", Heath (ed) 1997.] Later aestheticians identified three major genres: epic poetry, lyric poetry and dramatic poetry, treating comedy and tragedy as subgenres of dramatic poetry. Aristotle's work was influential throughout the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age, [Ibn Rushd (Averroes) wrote a commentary on Aristotle's "Poetics", replacing the original examples with passages from Arabic poets. See for example, W. F. Bogges, 'Hermannus Alemannus' Latin Anthology of Arabic Poetry,' "Journal of the American Oriental Society," 1968, Volume 88, 657-70, and Charles Burnett, 'Learned Knowledge of Arabic Poetry, Rhymed Prose, and Didactic Verse from Petrus Alfonsi to Petrarch', in "Poetry and Philosophy in the Middle Ages: A Festschrift for Peter Dronke," 2001. ISBN 90-04-11964-7.] as well as in Europe during the Renaissance. [See, for example, Paul F Grendler, "The Universities of the Italian Renaissance," Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8018-8055-6 (for example, page 239) for the prominence of Aristotle and the "Poetics" on the Renaissance curriculum.] Later poets and aestheticians often distinguished poetry from, and defined it in opposition to, prose, which was generally understood as writing with a proclivity to logical explication and a linear narrative structure. [Immanuel Kant (J.H. Bernard, trans.), Critique of Judgment (2005) at 131, for example, argues that the nature of poetry as a self-consciously abstract and beautiful form raises it to the highest level among the verbal arts, with tone or music following it, and only after that the more logical and narrative prose.]

This does not imply that poetry is illogical or lacks narration, but rather that poetry is an attempt to render the beautiful or sublime without the burden of engaging the logical or narrative thought process. English Romantic poet John Keats termed this escape from logic, "Negative Capability." ["The Challenge of Keats"; Christensen, A., Crisafulli-Jones, L., Galigani, G. and Johnson, A. (eds), 2000.] This "romantic" approach views form as a key element of successful poetry because form is abstract and distinct from the underlying notional logic. This approach remained influential into the twentieth century. During this period, there was also substantially more interaction among the various poetic traditions, in part due to the spread of European colonialism and the attendant rise in global trade. In addition to a boom in translation, during the Romantic period numerous ancient works were rediscovered.

Modern developments

The use of verse to transmit cultural information continues today. Many Americans know that "in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue". An alphabet song teaches the names and order of the letters of the alphabet; another jingle states the lengths and names of the months in the Gregorian calendar. Some writers believe poetry has its origins in song. Most of the characteristics that distinguish it from other forms of utterance—rhythm, rhyme, compression, intensity of feeling, the use of refrains—appear to have come about from efforts to fit words to musical forms. In the European tradition the earliest surviving poems, the Homeric and Hesiodic epics, identify themselves as poems to be recited or chanted to a musical accompaniment rather than as pure song. Another interpretation is that rhythm, refrains, and kennings are essentially paratactic devices that enable the reciter to reconstruct the poem from memory.

In preliterate societies, these forms of poetry were composed for, and sometimes during, performance. There was a certain degree of fluidity to the exact wording of poems. The introduction of writing fixed the content of a poem to the version that happened to be written down and survive. Written composition meant poets began to compose for an absent reader. The invention of printing accelerated these trends. Poets were now writing more for the eye than for the ear.

Lyric poetry

The development of literacy gave rise to more personal, shorter poems intended to be sung. These are called lyrics, which derives from the Greek "lura" or lyre, the instrument that was used to accompany the performance of Greek lyrics from about the seventh century BC onward. The Greek's practice of singing hymns in large choruses gave rise in the sixth century BC to dramatic verse, and to the practice of writing poetic plays for performance in their theatres. In more recent times, the introduction of electronic media and the rise of the poetry reading have led to a resurgence of performance poetry. The late 20th-century rise of the singer-songwriter, Rap culture, and the increase in popularity of poetry slams have led to a split between the academic and popular views.

References

ee also

* Poetry
* List of years in poetry