History of poetry
Many of the poems surviving from the ancient world are recorded prayers, or stories about religious subject matter, but they also include historical accounts, instructions for everyday activities, love songs,[2] and fiction.
[a] Poetry appears among the earliest records of most literate cultures, with poetic fragments found on early monoliths, runestones, and stelae.
[7] The oldest surviving speculative fiction poem is the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor,[8][better source needed] written in Hieratic and ascribed a date around 2500 BCE.
[9] The Istanbul tablet#2461, dating to c. 2000 BCE, describes an annual rite in which the king symbolically married and mated with the goddess Inanna to ensure fertility and prosperity; some have labelled it the world's oldest love poem.
Epic poetry appears to have been composed in poetic form as an aid to memorization and oral transmission in ancient societies.
[14] The Shijing, with its collection of poems and folk songs, was heavily valued by the philosopher Confucius and is considered to be one of the official Confucian classics.
In book III of the Republic, Plato defined poetry as a narrative genre separated into three types: the "simple," the "imitative," or some mix of the two.
He also famously, in book X, condemned poetry as evil, being only capable of creating deceptive and ineffectual copies of real-world corollaries.
[25] In his Poetics, Aristotle taxonomized ancient Greek drama[26] (which he called "poetry") into three subcategories: epic, comic, and tragic.
[30] Like Aristotle,[31] subsequent 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 global trade.
Generally, the folk type of poems they are anonymous, and may show signs of having been edited or polished in the process of fixing them in written characters.
We do have some secular poetry; in fact a great deal of medieval literature was written in verse, including the Old English epic Beowulf.
Scholars are fairly sure, based on a few fragments and on references in historic texts, that much lost secular poetry was set to music, and was spread by traveling minstrels, or bards, across Europe.
Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Maya Angelou, June Jordan, Allen Ginsberg, and Nobel laureate Louise Glück.
