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3 days ago · Find poems by featured poets, themes, forms, and collections on The Poetry Foundation website. Listen to audio readings, learn about poetic terms, and explore U.S. Latinx voices in poetry.
- Poem of The Day
Start each day with a poem delivered to your inbox! Poems...
- When I Stutter
When I Stutter - Poems | The Poetry Foundation
- Poem Guides
Poem Guides - Poems | The Poetry Foundation
- The Red Wheelbarrow
The Red Wheelbarrow - Poems | The Poetry Foundation
- Browse Poems
Browse Poems - Poems | The Poetry Foundation
- Sunflowers
Sunflowers - Poems | The Poetry Foundation
- The Breathing, The Endless News
The Breathing, The Endless News - Poems | The Poetry...
- What I Like
January 1983 | Jerald Bullis, Ralph Burns, J. Cullum, Dave...
- Poem of The Day
Poetry is a command-line tool that helps you manage your Python projects' dependencies and packages. It supports deterministic builds, easy publishing, dependency resolution, isolation and more.
poetry.sg is a home for Singapore poetry. Browse our selection of over 80 local poets with biographical data, critical scholarship and multimedia content.
- Overview
- Attempts to define poetry
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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.
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Learn about poetry, the other way of using language that evokes imaginative awareness and emotional response. Explore the properties, forms, and modes of poetry, and see examples from various traditions and genres.
Explore over 10,000 poems by classic and contemporary poets, organized by occasion, theme, and form. Find poems by title, author, year, or keyword in this curated collection.
But that said, we did our best to use available objective data in putting together this ranked list of the 100 most widely recognized and enduring poems ever written. To create this list, the following criteria was used: 1) Only poems that have "stood the test of time" were considered. Therefore, modern poetry of the last century was not included.
The Poetry Foundation is a nonprofit organization that promotes poetry and poets through publications, events, grants, and online resources. Explore the latest poetry and performance, form and craft, essays, comics, and more from the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine.
