Poetry

Poetry is the form of literary art that uses figurative language and whitty expressions to express
feelings, thoughts, and ideas. These can come from one single person, a group, or groups of people.
Poetry, and discussions of it, have a long history. Early 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 prose. From the mid-20th century, poetry has sometimes been more loosely defined as a
fundamental creative act using language.

Poetry often uses particular forms and conventions to suggest alternative meanings in the words, or
to evoke emotional or sensual responses. Devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and
rhythm are sometimes used to achieve musical or incantatory effects. The use of ambiguity, symbolism,
irony, and other stylistic elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations.
Similarly, metaphor, simile, and metonymy create a resonance between otherwise disparate images—a
layering of meanings, forming connections previously not perceived. Kindred forms of resonance may exist,
between individual verses, in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm.

Some forms of poetry are specific to particular cultures and genres, responding to the characteristics
of the language in which the poet writes. While readers accustomed to identifying poetry with Dante, Goethe,
Mickiewicz and Rumi may think of it as being written in rhyming lines and regular meter, there are traditions,
such as Biblical poetry, that use other approaches to achieve rhythm and euphony. Much of modern British and
American poetry is to some extent a critique of poetic tradition, playing with and testing (among other things)
the principle of euphony itself, to the extent that sometimes it deliberately does not rhyme or keep to set rhythms
at all. In today's globalized world, poets often borrow styles, techniques and forms from diverse cultures
and languages.