Perhaps the oldest kind of literature known to humanity, poetry in its earliest stages was told or sung, but during its long and continuing evolution it has become part of the written tradition and has been use for several purposes. Foremost among the many uses of poetry has been its ability as lyric, narrative, and epic to pay homage to the gods and to recount the history of specific groups of people.
Both European and American poets have been most influenced by Greek culture, in which the writers were known as poets, a title that carried both responsibility and praise. Greek literature consisted in large measure of plays that were written in poetry, a convention of the time. Roman poets adopted most of the rules of the Greeks, later revived during the Renaissance. Beginning with Geoffrey Chaucer, poetry in England flowered and spread throughout the English-speaking world and far beyond. Poetic forms are: verse, poem, song, ode, sonnet, ballad, elegy, parody, epigram, etc.
But what is poetry? According to William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge, the major role of poetry was to stand in opposition to science. Coleridge wrote: “poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science.” A great and influential man of writing of the Romantic period wrote that “Poetry begins where matter of fact or science ceases...” The American poetess of the 19th century Emily Dickinson alludes nearly to the same thing:
To clothe the fiery thought
In simple words succeeds,
For still the craft of genius is
To mask a king in weeds.
Poetry is often full of ideas, too, and sometimes poems can be powerful experiences of the mind, but most poems are primarily about how people feel rather than how people think. Poetry can be the voice of our feelings.
Though prose and poetry have much in common and a number of poets also write prose fiction, nevertheless, commonly accepted differences between the two genres are that poetry is generally written in meter, thus creating rhythm, and prose is not; rhyme is a characteristic feature of poetry (though not required) which prose doesn’t have. Poetry distills, compresses and refines knowledge through selective use of language, while prose is considered “ordinary” language. Poets are binding themselves in the chains of traditional poetic forms and then creating interaction between different elements of poetic technique. But nothing about poetry is as important as the way it makes us feel with the help of imagination, symbols and invention.
Sometimes poetry is freed from the old rules, evolves from confinement of rigid structure and sometimes content. This is what we now know as free verse − the kind of poetry which was fired a new kind of poet, epitomized by the great American poet Walt Whitman, poetry which relies heavily on imagery.
Poets employ various strategies and elements of poetic technique to frame their vision of human experience in verse, theme, diction, tone, imagery, symbolism, simile and metaphor, personification and apostrophe, metre, rhythm and rhyme, sound, structure and form.