Poetry is one of the oldest literary genres that man has developed, with the first examples already being found in the cultures of Antiquity.
One of the characteristics of poetry is that it gives greater importance to the aesthetic part over the structure or meaning. Such an objective is achieved through the use of innumerable literary devices that tend to embellish the form in various ways. That is to say, poetry is the maximum manifestation of beauty through the word, through the verse, or failing that, the prose, although, it should be noted that its most common use are poems and compositions in verse.
The poem, the best manifestation of poetry
Mostly, the poem appears written in verses, however, it is also possible to find it in poetic prose, for example, Rubén Darío, poet of Nicaraguan originis undoubtedly one of the greatest exponents of this type.
The great attraction of the poem is that uses innumerable expressive resources that know how to animate and express the most diverse emotionsfor example, the game that is generated from the sonority that some words have.
When the poem presents verses, it is common for them to have consonant or assonant rhymes, or to be made up of free verses.
If the poem is made up of two quatrains and two triplets, with a consonant rhyme and hendecasyllabic verses, it is called sonnet.
Meanwhile, if the poem has four lines and has a humorous content in which the second and fourth lines rhyme, it will be called couplet. And if the verse is made up of octosyllabic verses in which the odd verses do not have rhyme and the even ones have assonance rhyme, they are designated as romances.
A genre with a great history behind it
It is quite difficult to establish a specific point in the past time as the origin of poetry, although it is impossible to avoid a finding that dates back to the year 2,600 BC and which consists of hieroglyphic inscriptionswhich over time were considered as the first antecedent of poetry. They consist of songs that have a religious meaning and that develop in various genres such as odes, hymns, and elegies.
It is important to note that in the past and especially in some civilizations such as Sumerian, Assyro-Babylonian, and Jewishpoetry, had a rather ritual character
Meanwhile, at present, poetry is rather linked to the Romanticto romance, even more, when a lover wants to make his beloved fall in love and that she reciprocates him in love, it is a common resource for him to write a poem of his own in which he pours out all his feelings on the surface, or in his defect, if the lover does not have a facility for writing in this sense, he usually resorts to great classics of the genre to achieve his romantic end.
It should be noted that a large part of the literary documents of ancient civilizations that come down to us are written in the form of poetry. Clear examples of this are The Epic of Gilgamesh (belonging to the Sumerian civilization) or the famous and impressive Greek works iliad and Odysseythe interesting the jobs and the days and the aeneid, among many others. All these works tell legends, stories and situations of the daily life of each culture and express them in the form of verse, a highly popular resource in those historical periods.
salient features of poetry
Poetry is characterized by imposing a certain rhythm on the written text. This is verified through the systems of verses that vary in each case but that always maintain a particular rhythm to be respected. Marked in some cases more than in others, the poetic rhythm is also accompanied by the use of resources such as metaphors, comparisons, onomatopoeia, irony, rhetorical elements and others that seek to give a particular and unique style to each composition.
The most common forms of poetry in the Western tradition are the sonnets, among which those of Shakespeare stand out. However, poetry can also come in other forms such as sestinas, rondeaus (traditional French poems), the jintishi (typical Chinese poem), the haiku (characteristic Japanese poem) or the odestypical poems of the ancient Greek tradition.
Finally, we can add that poetry can appear separately as art, as well as integrated into other representations such as dance, theater, poetic and lyrical narrative, among others.
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