Search results
Historical poetry is a subgenre of poetry that has its roots in history. Its aim is to delineate events of the past by incorporating elements of artful composition and poetic diction.
Feb 8, 2024 · Historically, poetry has been used to perpetuate values and provide evidence of a shared cultural awareness of a time period, often providing new insight into a particular event or period that hasn’t been provided by more traditional sources of historical evidence.
- Overview
- Attempts to define poetry
poetry, literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm.
(Read Britannica’s biography of this author, Howard Nemerov.)
Poetry is the other way of using language. Perhaps in some hypothetical beginning of things it was the only way of using language or simply was language tout court, prose being the derivative and younger rival. Both poetry and language are fashionably thought to have belonged to ritual in early agricultural societies; and poetry in particular, it has been claimed, arose at first in the form of magical spells recited to ensure a good harvest. Whatever the truth of this hypothesis, it blurs a useful distinction: by the time there begins to be a separate class of objects called poems, recognizable as such, these objects are no longer much regarded for their possible yam-growing properties, and such magic as they may be thought capable of has retired to do its business upon the human spirit and not directly upon the natural world outside.
Britannica Quiz
Famous Poets and Poetic Form
Formally, poetry is recognizable by its greater dependence on at least one more parameter, the line, than appears in prose composition. This changes its appearance on the page; and it seems clear that people take their cue from this changed appearance, reading poetry aloud in a very different voice from their habitual voice, possibly because, as Ben Jonson said, poetry “speaketh somewhat above a mortal mouth.” If, as a test of this description, people are shown poems printed as prose, it most often turns out that they will read the result as prose simply because it looks that way; which is to say that they are no longer guided in their reading by the balance and shift of the line in relation to the breath as well as the syntax.
That is a minimal definition but perhaps not altogether uninformative. It may be all that ought to be attempted in the way of a definition: Poetry is the way it is because it looks that way, and it looks that way because it sounds that way and vice versa.
Exclusive academic rate for students! Save 67% on Britannica Premium.
Let us explore three remarkable historical poems that have touched the hearts and minds of readers throughout the ages: 1. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of Death. Rode the six hundred. "Forward, the Light Brigade!
Poets are often writing about historical events, from wars and battles to key political moments. But what about poets who turn their thoughts to the past and write about not the present day, but history from hundreds of years ago?
While nineteenth-century verse cultures revolved around reading by generic recognition, a reading of poetry as a form of cognition emerges among later critics like I. A. Richards, who illustrates how a line from Robert Browning is read in the mind’s eye, as if in the present tense.
Apr 17, 2024 · For over 4,000 years, people have been writing poetry to express personal, communal, or global experiences through one of the most intimate of art forms practiced by human beings in connecting with others.
