Poetry

Poetry is a form of literary art that uses the aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language, such as sound, rhythm and imagery, to evoke meaning beyond or instead of a work's literal, surface-level sense; a single instance is called a poem, composed by a poet. Poets deploy devices including metre, rhyme, assonance, alliteration and figures of speech such as metaphor and simile to create musical effects and layered meaning, organizing them into structures that range from strict traditional forms to loose or invented patterns. The genre's history reaches back to prehistoric oral and court poetry across Africa, the Fertile Crescent and the Eurasian continent, including the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the Chinese Shijing, the Sanskrit Rigveda and the Homeric epics, with Aristotle's Poetics among the earliest attempts to theorize its methods. Traditions vary widely by language and culture, from the regular rhyme and metre familiar from Dante, Goethe or Rumi to the alliterative and non-metrical rhythmic systems of Biblical poetry and Somali oral verse, and much modern poetry has tested or abandoned these conventions altogether.