week 6 post
So lets talk about poetry. It has been around for as long as mankind has had a spoken language! I happen to know from my prior educational experiences that poems were used as a memory technique for ancient story tellers to remember their tales. It is a lot easier to remember how a story told hundreds of years ago when it rhymes or follows a verbal pattern in meter and inflection. There are also various designs of meter and rhyme. There are different patterns such as dactyl, spondee, trochee, and other patterns that each offer their own individual and unique method of delivery.
Various famous poets throughout history have used their own unique spin on meter. Shakespeare used a format called iambic pentameter in his stories, where as Dante used hendecasyllble meter in his legendary “Divine Comedy” an epic story of a man’s journey from hell into heaven.
Poetry has taken a slightly different approach in modern poetry though. The overwhelming presence of rhyme and meter is greatly reduced in modern great poets like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thorough. Poetry in modern society is also less focused on great deeds and religion but rather directed towards nature and human emotion. Not to say that there was a lack of nature and emotion oriented poetry in ancient times but it is much more prevalent in today’s poetry.
Poetry also requires a great deal of thinking. If properly written it is not a simple one time read and understand but rather multiple reads and deeper thought.