The earliest recorded poems are part of oral tradition and often are musical. In his book Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong suggests that “language is nested in sound,” and scholars who study the origin of language have theorised that music and language developed alongside of one another in our evolutionary past. Reflecting on the relationship between poetry and African American musical traditions, such as the blues and work songs, Edward Hirsh suggests that “all these forms model a particular kind of participatory relationship between the poet and the community.” Many modern poetic forms are also clearly influenced by musical forms. For example, Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues borrows heavily from jazz and blues rhythms, yet does not follow classical metrical patterns. Like songs, poems are meant to be performed, recited, and perhaps in their own, sung.
Most traditional forms of poetry have their origins in forms of popular music. Longer poetic artifacts such as the great epics of the Greeks (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey ), the Romans (Virgil’s Aeneid ), and from India (the Vedas , written in Sanskrit) are well-known. Ancient Babylonian hymns, like the Enûma Eliš , written in cuneiform, are widely regarded as the earliest known poems; likewise, the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest popular epic. Many scholars have observed the similarities the Babylonia flood myth in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the biblical story of the flood in the book of Genesis.
An epic poem is a lengthy narrative poem (a poem that tells a story, often an adventure) written in verse. Similar to music, in poetry, verse refers to a piece of writing composed in meter or rhyme. The word verse may appear in some contexts as a synonym for poetry of any meter (or non-meter); this is not precise usage of the word and usually aims to distinguish the form of literature from prose , which is structured without the same attention to the meter and length of line in poetry.
One of the earliest known works of English poetry is Caedmon's Hymn, composed sometime between 658 and 680 A.D. According to accounts by an English monk and scholar known as St. Bede or the Venerable Bede, the poem was originally composed by an illiterate herdsman who had miraculously acquired the gift of poetry and song from an angel. Its lyrics are composed in a form of early English that originated in a form of ancient German.
A ballad is another type of narrative poem that contains repeated phrasing and is intended to be sung. Ballads often relate the deeds, and sometimes suffering, of a protagonist whose life serves as a metaphor for the day-to-day trials of the average person. (An example of a ballad in this module is “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver” by Edna St. Vincent Millay). Ballads are typically arranged into quatrains , four-line stanzas, with usually only the second and fourth lines rhyming.
In contrast to narrative poetry (poetry that tells a story), lyric poetry focuses primarily on conveying emotion through melody and imagery. Sonnets fall under the category of lyric poetry; a sonnet is a poem consisting of fourteen lines with a metric pattern and variable rhyme scheme. Elegies (lamentations), haiku, and odes (praise poems) are other examples of lyric poetry. (Examples of lyric verse in our course readings include John Milton’s Sonnet 19, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” and Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum est”).
Blank verse is the term for poetry that does have a set metrical pattern, yet does not rhyme. John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, is a masterful work of blank verse poetry that was highly influential as a work of English literature. However, many modern and contemporary poets write blank verse poetry, such as Robert Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man” and Amy Beeder’s “Dear Drought,” Free verse , which did not develop until the 19 th century, follows no metrical pattern or rhyme scheme; much of modern poetry is free verse, although many modern poets who usually write in free verse will produce patterned verse on occasion. (Examples of free verse in this module include H.D.’s “Oread” and William Carlos Williams’s “Blizzard.”)