Concept in Definition ABC

Poetry is one of the oldest literary genres that man has developed, the first examples being found in ancient cultures.

One of the characteristics of poetry is that it gives greater importance to the aesthetic part over the structure or the meaning. He achieves such a goal through the use of countless literary resources They tend to embellish the shape in various ways. That is to say, poetry is the maximum manifestation of beauty through words, through verse, or, failing that, prose, although it should be noted that its most common use they are poems and compositions in verse.

The poem, the best expression of poetry

Mostly, the poem appears written in verses, however, it is also possible to find it in poetic prose, for example, Rubén Darío, poet of Nicaraguan origin, is undoubtedly one of the greatest exponents of this type.

The great attraction of the poem is that employs countless resources expressive who know how to animate and express the most diverse emotions, for example, the game that is generated from the sound that some words show.

When the poem presents verses it is usual that they show consonant rhymes or, failing that, assonance, or be made up of free verses.

If the poem is made up of two quartets and two triplets, with consonant rhymes and hendecasyllable verses, it is called sonnet.
Meanwhile, if the poem has four lines and has a humorous content in which the second and fourth lines rhyme, it will be called couplet. And if the verse consists of eight-syllable verses in which the odd verses do not have rhyme and the pairs present assonance rhyme, they are designated as romances.

A genre with a great history behind it

It is quite difficult to establish a specific point in time past as the origin of poetry, although, it is impossible to avoid a finding that dates back to the year 2,600 BC and that consists of hieroglyphic inscriptions, which over time were considered as the first antecedent of poetry. They consist of songs that have a religious meaning and that are developed in various genres such as odes, hymns and elegies.
It is important to note that in the past and especially in some civilizations such as the Sumerian, the Assyrian-Babylonian and the Jewish, poetry, had a rather ritual character

Meanwhile, nowadays, poetry is rather linked to what Romantic, to romance, even more, when a lover wants to make her loved one fall in love with her and that she reciprocates him in love, it is a common resource that he writes a poetry of her authorship in which she dumps all her feelings to flower leather, or failing it, if the lover does not have a writing facility in this sense, he usually uses the great classics of the genre to achieve his romantic end.

It should be noted that a large part of the literary documents of ancient civilizations that reach us are written in the form of poetry. Clear examples of this are The Poem of Gilgamesh (belonging to the civilization Sumerian) or the famous and impressive Greek works Iliad Y Odyssey, the interesting the jobs and the days Y The Aeneid, among many others. All these works tell legends, stories and situations of the daily life of each culture and express them in the form of verse, a highly popular resource in those historical periods.

Salient characteristics of poetry

Poetry is characterized by imposing a certain rhythm to text written. This is verified through the verse systems that vary in each case but always maintain a particular rhythmic to be respected. Marked in some cases more than in others, the poetic rhythm is also accompanied by the use of resources such as metaphors, comparisons, onomatopoeias, ironies, rhetorical elements and others that seek to give a particular and unique style to each composition.

The most common forms of poetry in the tradition western are the sonnets, among which those of Shakespeare stand out. However, poetry can also be presented in other forms such as sestinas, rondeaus (traditional French poems), the jintishi (typical Chinese poem), the haiku (characteristic Japanese poem) or the odes, typical poems of the ancient Greek tradition.

Finally, we can add that poetry can appear separately as art, as well as integrated into other representations such as dance, theater, the poetic narrative, and the lyric, among others.