Portal:Poetry
Welcome to the Poetry Portal
Poetry (a term derived from the Greek word poiesis, "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle.
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...)
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Ginsberg began work on "Howl" as early as 1954. In the Paul Blackburn Tape Archive at the University of California, San Diego, Ginsberg can be heard reading early drafts of his poem to his fellow writing associates. "Howl" is considered to be one of the great works of American literature. It came to be associated with the group of writers known as the Beat Generation, which included Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.
There is no foundation to the myth that "Howl" was written as a performance piece and later published by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books. This myth was perpetuated by Ferlinghetti as part of the defense's case during the poem's obscenity trial, as detailed below. Upon the poem's release, Ferlinghetti and the bookstore's manager, Shigeyoshi Murao, were charged with disseminating obscene literature, and both were arrested. On October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene. (Full article...)
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Poetry WikiProject
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Masaoka Shiki (正岡 子規, October 14, 1867 – September 19, 1902), pen-name of Masaoka Noboru (正岡 升), was a Japanese poet, author, and literary critic in Meiji period Japan. Shiki is regarded as a major figure in the development of modern haiku poetry, credited with writing nearly 20,000 stanzas during his short life. He also wrote on reform of tanka poetry.
Some consider Shiki to be one of the four great haiku masters, the others being Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa.
Did you know (auto-generated) -
- ... that French West African poet David Diop was among 63 people killed when Air France Flight 343 crashed in 1960?
- ... that Nirmalendu Goon shared his doubts about Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's political decisions during the 1969 East Pakistan mass uprising in his poem Huliya?
- ... that Burton Raffel called Arthur Cooper's translation of a poem by Du Fu "exceedingly lame"?
- ... that the illustrations in the 1992 video game Tetris Classic are based on scenes from Alexander Pushkin's poem Ruslan and Ludmila?
- ... that a 1982 composition by David Sampson is based on a 1931 poem inspired by the ancient Greek Eleusinian Mysteries?
- ... 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?
Selected poem
| Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service by T. S. Eliot |
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POLYPHILOPROGENITIVE
The sapient sutlers of the Lord In the beginning was the Word. A painter of the Umbrian school But through the water pale and thin The sable presbyters approach Under the penitential gates Along the garden-wall the bees Sweeney shifts from ham to ham |
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