“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

-Emily Dickinson

A poem is more than an after-dinner mint.

Poetry is the central language of human civilization, and thus the form of art that affirms our deepest humanity: all other forms of imaginative literature spring from it; it is the core genre and the principal modality of linguistic art. What today we call poetry largely consists of short, voice-driven lyrical poems, although these may encompass a variety of styles, but the roots and history of poetry range across many widely disparate traditions and types.

Some of humanity’s earliest extant poetry, descended both from the oral and written traditions, are epic poems. While today we often use the word epic to describe something wonderfully impressive, e.g. “Dude, that kickflip was totally epic!”—at its foundation the epic is correctly used to describe a long, heroic narrative poem, which usually deals with certain great themes, such as the founding of a city or a civilization. One of the most notably epic poets, whose work grew out of the oral tradition and was eventually written down, was the legendary ancient Greek poet, Homer, who produced two epic poems that are read, relished, and studied to this day: The Iliad and The Odyssey.

In the past three thousand years, poetry has gone through many changes, evolutions, innovations, reversions, and expansions. Tracking the history of poetry is a fantastic way to track the history of human thought and social change. Some of humanity's most exemplary and transformational moments were both called for by its poets and described and deepened by their work. One important example of this is the Romantic Movement, which flourished from the late 18th century to the late 19th century. Romanticism, as its often called, not only reflects a major shift in the literary, artisitic, and musical culture of the West, but instantiates and helped to propagate important shifts in how the individual was seen vis à vis society at large. This had enormously, world-changing impacts politically, and the work of poets such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley helped to define this period of social and political change, flowing from the two major democratic revolutions at the end of the 18th century: the French Revolution and the American Revolution.

Poetry represents the high art of the written word—its most compressed, impactful, nuanced, and potent usages in any language. Mastering poetry is thus a high art, akin to painting, music, drama, or dance. When one composes poetry, knowingly or inadvertently, the poet conjures a constellation of previous ideas and phraseology. Thus, since they must “tango” with the great thinkers and writers of the past, great poets almost universally begin (and continue) their careers, as great readers of poetry.

As a genre, poetry can be expressed and published in a variety of ways. It can readily be learned by heart and recited by individuals. It can be published in magazines or in book form, and it can also be included within other literary forms, adding dimensionality to literary works such novels and plays. And poetry obviously has a deep and longstanding relationship with song, which might be thought of as a common ancestor with the contemporary poetic tradition.