Portal:Poetry

Welcome to the Poetry Portal

The first lines of the Iliad

Great Seal Script character for poetry, ancient China

Poetry (from the Greek word poiesis, "making") 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 meanings. Any particular instance of poetry is called a poem and is written by a poet. Poets use a variety of techniques called poetic devices, such as assonance, alliteration, euphony and cacophony, onomatopoeia, rhythm (via metre), and sound symbolism, to produce musical or incantatory effects. Most poems are formatted in verse: a series or stack of lines on a page, which follow a rhythmic or other deliberate pattern. For this reason, verse has also become a synonym (a metonym) for poetry.

Poetry has a long and varied history, evolving differentially across the globe. It dates back at least to prehistoric times with hunting poetry in Africa and to panegyric and elegiac court poetry of the empires of the Nile, Niger, and Volta River valleys. Some of the earliest written poetry in Africa occurs among the Pyramid Texts written during the 25th century BCE. The earliest surviving Western Asian epic poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, was written in the Sumerian language.

Early poems in the Eurasian continent evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing as well as from religious hymns (the Sanskrit Rigveda, the Zoroastrian Gathas, the Hurrian songs, and the Hebrew Psalms); or from a need to retell oral epics, as with the Egyptian Story of Sinuhe, Indian epic poetry, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. (Full article...)

Selected article

Title page of 1556 edition published by Joannes Gryphius (decorative border added subsequently)

The Metamorphoses (Latin: Metamorphōseōn librī: "Books of Transformations") is a Latin narrative poem by the Roman poet Ovid, considered his magnum opus. Comprising fifteen books and over 250 myths, the poem chronicles the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar within a loose mythico-historical framework.

Although meeting the criteria for an epic, the poem defies simple genre classification by its use of varying themes and tones. Ovid took inspiration from the genre of metamorphosis poetry, and some of the Metamorphoses derives from earlier treatment of the same myths; however, he diverged significantly from all of his models.

One of the most influential works in Western culture, the Metamorphoses has inspired such authors as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante and Boccaccio. Numerous episodes from the poem have been depicted in masterpieces of sculpture and painting by artists such as Titian. Although interest in Ovid faded after the Renaissance, towards the end of the twentieth century there was a resurgence of attention to his work; today, the Metamorphoses continues to inspire and be retold through various media. The work has been the subject of numerous translations into English, the first by William Caxton in 1480. (Full article...)

Selected image

Nonsense verse and illustration by Edward Lear, from A Book of Nonsense I

image credit: public domain

Poetry WikiProject

Charles Baudelaire

The poetry WikiProject works to improve the quality and scope of all poetry-related articles. Please join us!

Selected biography

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic who was a major figure of the early modernist movement. His contribution to poetry began with his development of Imagism, a movement derived from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language. His best-known works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and the unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos (1917–69).

Working in London in the early 20th century as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, Pound helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway. He was responsible for the 1915 publication of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses. Hemingway wrote of him in 1925: "He defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. ... He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying ... he advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide."

Outraged by the carnage of World War I, Pound lost faith in England and blamed the war on usury and international capitalism. He moved to Italy in 1924, and throughout the 1930s and 1940s embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler and wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Oswald Mosley. During World War II he was paid by the Italian government to make hundreds of radio broadcasts criticizing the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jews, as a result of which he was arrested by American forces in Italy in 1945 on charges of treason. He spent months in detention in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including three weeks in a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage that he said triggered a mental breakdown, "when the raft broke and the waters went over me". Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years. (Full article...)

Did you know (auto-generated) -

• ... that scholars debate whether Anactoria, mentioned in Sappho's poems, was a real person, a pseudonym, or an invention of Sappho?
• ... that the seafaring poet D. I. Antoniou worked on a single poem for more than a decade and ended up publishing it over thirty years later?
• ... that Michael Huber's translation of Salomon Gessner's works into French made Gessner the best-known German-language poet in Europe before Goethe?
• ... that the 1887 execution of George Flaxman may have inspired Rudyard Kipling's poem "Danny Deever"?
• ... that Micah Joseph Lebensohn began to translate poetry into Hebrew at the age of twelve?
• ... that Zygmunt Krasiński, one of Poland's Three Bards, published most of his works anonymously and was known as the Anonymous Poet of Poland?

Selected poem

Eight Sonnets: Sonnet 1 by Edna St. Vincent Millay

When you, that at this moment are to me Dearer than words on paper, shall depart, And be no more the warder of my heart, Whereof again myself shall hold the key; And be no more, what now you seem to be, The sun, from which all excellencies start In a round nimbus, nor a broken dart Of moonlight, even, splintered on the sea; I shall remember only of this hour– And weep somewhat, as now you see me weep– The pathos of your love, that, like a flower, Fearful of death yet amorous of sleep, Droops for a moment and beholds, dismayed, The wind whereon its petals shall be laid.

Related portals

Topics

Recognized content

Categories

Category puzzle

Select [►] to view subcategories

Poetry

Poetry by country

Poetry by language

Poetry by period

Poems

Poets

Poetry-related lists

African poetry

Aviation poetry

Poetry awards

Poetry books

Characters in poems

Cultural depictions of poets

Poetry festivals

Genres of poetry

History of poetry

Indigenous poetry

Poetry museums

Poetry organizations

Poetics

Poetry houses

Poetry publishers

Spoken word

Works about poetry

Poetry stubs

Poets

Poets by continent

Poets by ethnicity

Poets by genre

Poets by language

Poets by nationality

Poets by period

Poets by religion

Lists of poets

Poets with disabilities

Indigenous poets

LGBT poets

Male poets

Women poets

Poets of Alexander the Great

Ashiks

Children's poets

Communist poets

Cultural depictions of poets

Fictional poets

Formalist poets

Humorous poets

Jacobite poets

Marxist poets

Poètes maudits

Mennonite poets

Modernist poets

Mystic poets

Objectivist poets

Oral poets

Outlaw poets

Poet priests

Poetry instructors

Poets laureate

Romantic poets

Sonneteers

Sound poets

Spoken word poets

Surrealist poets

Symbolist poets

War poets

Works about poets

Poet stubs

Wikipedia categories named after poets

English poetry

English poems

English poets

English poetry books

Middle English poetry

Old English poetry

Genres of poetry

Poetry by genre

Epic poetry

Folk poetry

Graphic poetry

Jazz poetry

Laments

Monologues

Poetry movements

Narrative poems

Nonsense poetry

Nursery rhymes

Occitan literary genres

Rapping

Slam poetry

Verse contests

Associated Wikimedia

The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:

• 

  Commons
  Free media repository

• 

  Wikibooks
  Free textbooks and manuals

• 

  Wikidata
  Free knowledge base

• 

  Wikinews
  Free-content news

• 

  Wikiquote
  Collection of quotations

• 

  Wikisource
  Free-content library

• 

  Wikiversity
  Free learning tools

• 

  Wiktionary
  Dictionary and thesaurus

Discover Wikipedia using portals

• 

  List of all portals

• 

  The arts portal

• 

  Biography portal

• 

  Current events portal

• 

  Geography portal

• 

  History portal

• 

  Mathematics portal

• 

  Science portal

• 

  Society portal

• 

  Technology portal

• 

  Random portal

• 

  WikiProject Portals