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The first lines of the Iliad
The first lines of the Iliad
Great Seal Script character for poetry, ancient China
Great Seal Script character for poetry, ancient China

Poetry (derived from the Greek 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 poetry, the Epic of Gilgamesh, was written in Sumerian.

Early poems in the Eurasian continent evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing, as well as 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, the Indian epic poetry, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Ancient Greek attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle's Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song, and comedy. Later attempts concentrated on features such as repetition, verse form, and rhyme, and emphasized the aesthetics which distinguish poetry from more objectively-informative prosaic writing. (Full article...)

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page from a 5th century edition of the Aeneid
page from a 5th century edition of the Aeneid

The Aeneid (/ɪˈnɪd/; Latin: Aeneis [ae̯ˈneːɪs]) is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It is composed of 9,896 lines in dactylic hexameter. The first six of the poem's twelve books tell the story of Aeneas's wanderings from Troy to Italy, and the poem's second half tells of the Trojans' ultimately victorious war upon the Latins, under whose name Aeneas and his Trojan followers are destined to be subsumed.

The hero Aeneas was already known to Greco-Roman legend and myth, having been a character in the Iliad, composed in the 8th century BC. Virgil took the disconnected tales of Aeneas's wanderings, his vague association with the foundation of Rome and a personage of no fixed characteristics other than a scrupulous pietas, and fashioned this into a compelling founding myth or national epic that at once tied Rome to the legends of Troy, explained the Punic wars, glorified traditional Roman virtues and legitimized the Julio-Claudian dynasty as descendants of the founders, heroes and gods of Rome and Troy. (Full article...)

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image credit: Édouard Manet, 1876, Musée d'Orsay

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Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire
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Poem by Du Fu, as written by Dong Qichang, 16th or 17th century
Poem by Du Fu, as written by Dong Qichang, 16th or 17th century

Du Fu (Wade–Giles: Tu Fu; Chinese: 杜甫; pinyin: Dù Fǔ; 712 – 770) was a prominent Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty. Along with Li Bai (Li Po), he is frequently called the greatest of the Chinese poets. His greatest ambition was to serve his country as a successful civil servant, but he proved unable to make the necessary accommodations. His life, like the whole country, was devastated by the An Lushan Rebellion of 755, and his last 15 years were a time of almost constant unrest.

Although initially he was little-known to other writers, his works came to be hugely influential in both Chinese and Japanese literary culture. Of his poetic writing, nearly fifteen hundred poems have been preserved over the ages. He has been called the "Poet-Historian" and the "Poet-Sage" by Chinese critics, while the range of his work has allowed him to be introduced to Western readers as "the Chinese Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, Béranger, Hugo or Baudelaire".

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Beyond Seas by Sohrab Sepehri

I shall build a boat
I shall cast it in the water
I shall sail away from this strange earth
Where no one awaken the heroes in the wood of love

A boat empty of net
And longing heart for pearls
I shall continue sailing
Neither I shall loose my heart for the blues
Nor for the mermaids who emergeed from the water
To spread their charm from their locks
On the shining solitude of fishermen

I shall continue sailing
I shall continue singing
“One should sail away, sail away.”
The man in that town had no myth
The woman in that town was not as brimful as a cluster of grapes

No hall mirror repeated joys
Not even puddles reflected a torch
One should sail away, sail away
Night has sung its song
Now it is the turn of windows

I shall continue sailing
I shall continue singing

Beyond the seas there is a town
In which windows open to manifestation
There rooftops quarter pigeons that looks at the jets of human intelligence
In the hand of each 10-year-old child a branch of knowledge lies
The townsfolk took at hedges
As if they look at a flame, a tender dream
Earth hears the music of your feeling
And the fluttering sound of mythological birds are heard in the wind

Beyond the seas there is a town
Where the sun is as wide as the eyes of early-risers
Poets inherit water, wisdom and light

Beyond the seas there is a town!
One must build a boat

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