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3 days ago · Explore poems by theme, form, poet, or occasion on the website of the Poetry Foundation. Find featured poems, audio, collections, glossary, guides, and more.
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When I Stutter - Poems | The Poetry Foundation
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- The Red Wheelbarrow
Source: The Collected Poems: Volume I 1909-1939 (New...
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- Sunflowers
Just a thing rough to the touch, a face like a thousand...
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January 1983 | Jerald Bullis, Ralph Burns, J. Cullum, Dave...
- The Harlem Renaissance
The literary aspect of the Harlem Renaissance is said to...
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- 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 a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or an emotional response. Explore the properties, forms, and modes of poetry, and see examples from various traditions and genres.
The Poetry Foundation is a nonprofit organization that fosters spaces for all to create, experience, and share poetry. Explore the latest poems, books, reviews, audio, and more from featured poets and Poetry magazine.
Explore over 10,000 poems by classic and contemporary poets, organized by occasion, theme, and form. Find poems by keyword or poet's name, or browse the poem-a-day archive and literary seminars.
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