Portal:Poetry
Portal:Poetry
Poetry (a term derived from the Greek word 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 poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, was written in the Sumerian language.
Early poems in the Eurasian continent evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing as well as from 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, Indian epic poetry, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. (Full article...)
Four Quartets is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were published individually over a six-year period. The first poem, Burnt Norton, was written and published with a collection of his early works following the production of Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral. After a few years, Eliot composed the other three poems, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, which were written during World War II and the air-raids on Great Britain. The poems were not collected until Eliot's New York publisher printed them together in 1943. They were first published as a series in Great Britain in 1944 towards the end of Eliot's poetic career.
Four Quartets are four interlinked meditations with the common theme being man's relationship with time, the universe, and the divine. In describing his understanding of the divine within the poems, Eliot blends his Anglo-Catholicism with mystical, philosophical and poetic works from both Eastern and Western religious and cultural traditions, with references to the Bhagavad-Gita and the Pre-Socratics as well as St. John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich.
Although many critics find the Four Quartets to be Eliot's great last work, some of Eliot's contemporary critics, including George Orwell, were dissatisfied with Eliot's overt religiosity. Later critics disagreed with Orwell's claims about the poems and argued instead that the religious themes made the poem stronger. Overall, reviews of the poem within Great Britain were favourable while reviews in the United States were split between those who liked Eliot's later style and others who felt he had abandoned positive aspects of his earlier poetry. (Full article...)
Yeats was a very good friend of American expatriate poet and Bollingen Prize laureate Ezra Pound. Yeats wrote the introduction for Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali, which was published by the India Society. (Full article...)
- ... that the 1980 bibliography The Old French Tristan Poems was praised for indexing the fragments of Tristan, a 12th-century poem?
- ... that the tallest captive elephant in Asia has been commemorated in verse, sculpture and film?
- ... that Mihai Eminescu's poem "Out of All the Masts", which Eminescu himself never intended to publish, has won posthumous praise as a "perfect combination of words"?
- ... that known books bound in human skin include a highwayman's memoirs bound in his own skin, a novel about a man being left by his lesbian wife, and a BDSM erotic poem?
- ... that one music critic said that despite being "noisy, banal, fundamentally insincere", Dmitri Shostakovich's symphonic poem October was nonetheless "enjoyable trash"?
- ... that Isabella Correa was one of the few Jewish women poets active in the Netherlands before the 19th century?
How Huineng became the 6th patriarch of Zen Buddhism: a poetry contest, with works by Shenxiu and by Huineng |
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The gatha by Shenxiu: |
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