

This is an excerpt from Joyce Kilmer’s famous short poem. IV. Examples in of Poetry Literature Example 1

Poetry can be written with all the same purposes as any other kind of literature – beauty, humor, storytelling, political messages, etc. Rhythm and rhyme can make the text more memorable, and thus easier to preserve for cultures that do not have a written language. This style of writing may have developed to help people memorize long chains of information in the days before writing. Examples include the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Vedas (sacred texts of Hinduism).

The oldest written manuscripts we have are poems, mostly epic poems telling the stories of ancient mythology. Poetry is probably the oldest form of literature, and probably predates the origin of writing itself. In a more humorous vein, many Star Trek fans have taken to writing love poetry in the invented Klingon language. Tolkien famously wrote different kinds of poetry for elves, dwarves, hobbits, and humans, and the rhythms and subject matter of their poetry was supposed to show how these races differed from one another.

Because of this, fantasy and science fiction authors often create poetry for their invented cultures. Poetry gives powerful insight into the cultures that create it. Homer’s long poems tell stories of Greek heroes like Achilles and Odysseus, and have inspired countless generations of poets, novelists, and philosophers alike. He wrote in a style called epic poetry, which deals with gods, heroes, monsters, and other large-scale “epic” themes. The Greek poet Homer wrote some of the ancient world’s most famous literature. Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, This article, for example, is written in prose. The opposite of poetry is “prose” – that is, normal text that runs without line breaks or rhythm. These poems, however, still have a rhythmic quality and seek to create beauty through their words. Although these classical forms are still widely used today, modern poets frequently do away with rules altogether – their poems generally do not rhyme, and do not fit any particular meter. For example, Anglo-Saxon poets had their own rhyme schemes and meters, while Greek poets and Arabic poets had others. Poetry was once written according to fairly strict rules of meter and rhyme, and each culture had its own rules. In poetry, words are strung together to form sounds, images, and ideas that might be too complex or abstract to describe directly. It often employs rhyme and meter (a set of rules governing the number and arrangement of syllables in each line). Poetry is a type of literature based on the interplay of words and rhythm.
