Poetry

What is poetry?

People have communicated through poetry for centuries. The first forms of poetry were spoken. People have used poetry to tell stories and to pass on information because poetry is easier to remember than prose. It is easier to remember because of its musical quality. Even today, people use songs and poems to remember stories and information. Poetry is musical because it has rhythm.

There are a variety of poetic forms with their own unique structures, styles, and topics. Most poetry, however, deals with topics of an emotional or philosophical nature. Words and literary devices are selected carefully. Generally, poets use as few words as possible to convey their messages.

Modem poets tend to rely less on rigid use of rhythm, rhyme, and form to create their poems. Modem poets still use some of these conventions, especially rhythm, but in a less rigid way. This type of poetry is called free verse.

Poetry is structured differently than prose, everyday writing. Poetry involves joining words to make a line of poetry (also called a verse) and joining lines of poetry to form stanzas. Several lines of poetry may be needed to create what is equivalent to a sentence in prose. Each line of a poem is usually capitalized. Stanzas are roughly equivalent to paragraphs in prose. Stanzas may be organized into larger sections.

Differences in structure, word choice, literary devices, and style can make reading some poetry challenging. Poetry is written in such a way the reader may need to infer the main idea or theme. Readers often need to consult a dictionary to learn the meaning of new words. The larger your vocabulary, the more you know about the author, and the more you know about the time and place a poem was written, the easier it will be to discover the poems meaning.