POETRY AND THE EMERGING WORLD SCENARIO

 INTRODUCTION

• What is poetry for? What is the purpose of poetry?

Poetry is an expression of inner emotions, much like music, art, painting, it is an abstract form of expression.

The purpose of poetry is to derive the aesthetic pleasure and evoke human emotions with the use of language.

• Poetry as a literary form – Poetry evolved as a form of literature in the pre-historic times, even before writing where poems were sung as a tale from mouth to mouth by minstrels before being written down as text.

Example: Beowulf – The oldest surviving epic in Old English

Refer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_poetry

• History of Poetry

“Poetry has a long history, dating back to prehistorical times with the creation of hunting poetry in Africa, and panegyric and elegiac court poetry were developed extensively throughout the history of the empires of the Nile, Niger, and Volta river valleys [4]. Some of the earliest written poetry in Africa can be found among the Pyramid Texts written during the 25th century BC, while the Epic of Sundiata is one of the most well-known examples of griot court poetry. The earliest Western Asian epic poetry, the Epic of Gilgamesh, was written in Sumerian. Early poems in the Eurasian continent evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing, or from a need to retell oral epics, as with the Sanskrit Vedas, Zoroastrian Gathas, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Ancient Greek 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.” (Source Wikipedia)

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