Timeless: History of Poetry

Poetry has been around almost since the beginning of human dialect. In fact, the earliest known poem, the "Epic of Gilgamesh," is thought to have been recorded at around 2,500 B.C, a time that experts believe is almost as old as speech itself. Most of the earliest poems were written to verbally record cultural events and relate stories. Experts believe that these poems, including countless epics that have been lost in the sands of time, were performed orally and through song prehistorically.

Most of the oldest poems are attributed to containing prayers and religious matter. In fact, histories about these people's menial, everyday events such as war and politics are extremely rare and incredibly valuable to historians.

With the development of writing, poems moved into a more developed form. Poetry styles with specific, sharply defined boundaries emerged, including sonnets and rhymes. William Shakespeare is a great example of a poet who specialized in sonnets, he wrote over 150 of them, each with a unique idea expressed.

Such was the main focus of poetry until the late 1800's, when, mirroring society, it moved on from the quaint, laid-out styles it had so naturally taken to and exchanged them in favor of free-verse. Free-verse is the non-rhyming and seemingly chaotic poetry technique favored by writers such as T. S. Eliot, Carl Sandburg, Ezra Pound and others. It is argued by many that even some of the King James translation of the Bible, namely the book of Psalms and the Song of Solomon, is actually a form of free-verse. Free-verse, though it is unrhyming and often makes little sense to the uneducated reader, is known to be particularly thought provoking. Free-verse poets pride themselves in sringing together words in such ways that they force the reader into looking beyond literal meanings and digging deeper into metaphorical and symbolical concepts.

Currently, poetry is a perplexing torrent of free-verse and structured styles. While I do not believe either will ever completely overpower the other, I do think that both will continue to battle for position in the hearts and minds of modern readers who have learned to appreciate them. Poetry itself, I am sure, will never die. As man lives, so will it live.

~ Adam B.