Portal:Poetry Information
Welcome to the Poetry Portal
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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The first half of the story discusses Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, and Enkidu, a wild man created by the gods to stop him oppressing the people of Uruk. After an initial fight, Gilgamesh and Enkidu become close friends. Together, they journey to the Cedar Mountain and defeat Humbaba, its monstrous guardian. Later they kill the Bull of Heaven, which the goddess Ishtar sends to punish Gilgamesh for spurning her advances. As a punishment for these actions, the gods sentence Enkidu to death.
In the second half of the epic, Gilgamesh's distress at Enkidu's death causes him to undertake a long and perilous journey to discover the secret of eternal life. He eventually learns that "Life, which you look for, you will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands". However, because of his great building projects, his account of Siduri's advice, and what the immortal man Utnapishtim told him about the Great Flood, Gilgamesh's fame survived his death. His story has been translated into many languages, and in recent years has featured in works of popular fiction. (Full article...)
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Poetry WikiProject
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Rabindranath Tagore (
Bengali pronunciation:
[rəˈbindrəˈnɑt ˈtɑɡɔr] (
listen)), also written Rabīndranātha Thākura (pronounced
[rəˈbindrəˈnɑtə ˈtɑkʊrə]), (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941), sobriquet Gurudev, was a
Bengali
polymath who reshaped
Bengali literature and
music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of
Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European to win the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. In translation his poetry was viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. Tagore introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical
Sanskrit. He was highly influential in introducing the best of Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of the modern Indian subcontinent, being highly commemorated in India and Bangladesh, as well as in Sri Lanka, Nepal and Pakistan.
(Full article...)
Did you know (auto-generated) -
- ... that Christian Schreiber, a church administrator, philosopher and poet, wrote a German version of the Latin Mass for the publication, alongside the original, of Beethoven's Mass in C major?
- ... that the Friends of the Soviet Union was founded in 1941 with poet Rabindranath Tagore as its patron?
- ... that the title of Welsh musician The Anchoress's album The Art of Losing was inspired by American poet Elizabeth Bishop's poem " One Art"?
- ... that an Elvin man sang Poems and Songs of Middle Earth?
- ... that Kashmiri poet Madhosh Balhami lost 30 years of his poetry in a clash between militants and the Indian government?
- ... that when her local cafe was in lockdown, Kate Baer wrote her bestselling poems in her van in the cafe parking lot?
Selected poem
| A Flower Given to My Daughter by James Joyce |
|---|
|
Frail the white rose and frail are
Her hands that gave Rosefrail and fair-- yet frailest |
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