Portal:Poetry

The Poetry Portal

Poetry (from the Greek "ποίησις," poiesis, a "making" or "creating") is an art form in which language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, notional and semantic content. Poetry has a long history, and early attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle's Poetics, focused on the various uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song and comedy. Poetry often uses condensed forms and conventions to reinforce or expand the meaning of the underlying words or to invoke emotional or sensual experiences in the reader, as well as using devices such as assonance, alliteration and rhythm to achieve musical or incantatory effects.

Selected article

The Gettysburg Address is the most famous speech of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and one of the most quoted speeches in United States history. It was delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 19, 1863, during the American Civil War, four and a half months after the Battle of Gettysburg.

Lincoln's carefully crafted address, secondary to other presentations that day, came to be regarded as one of the greatest speeches in American history. In fewer than 300 words delivered in just over two minutes, Lincoln invoked the principles of human equality espoused by the Declaration of Independence and redefined the Civil War as a struggle not merely for the Union, but as "a new birth of freedom" that would bring true equality to all of its citizens.

Beginning with the now-iconic phrase "Four score and seven years ago," Lincoln referred to the events of the American Revolution and described the ceremony at Gettysburg as an opportunity not only to dedicate the grounds of a cemetery, but also to consecrate the living in the struggle to ensure that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

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Hayâlî was an Ottoman court poet and official during the 16th Century.

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Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), abbreviated E. E. Cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, and playwright. His publishers and others have sometimes echoed the unconventional capitalization in his poetry by writing his name in lower case, as e. e. cummings; Cummings himself did not approve of this rendering. Cummings is probably best known for his poems and their unorthodox usage of capitalization, layout, punctuation and syntax. There is extensive use of lower case; word gaps, line breaks and gaps appear in unexpected places; punctuation marks are omitted or misplaced, interrupting sentences and even individual words; grammar and word order are sometimes strange.

Selected poem

A Flower Given to My Daughter by James Joyce
Frail the white rose and frail are Her hands that gave Whose soul is sere and paler Than time's wan wave. Rosefrail and fair-- yet frailest A wonder wild In gentle eyes thou veilest, My blueveined child.

Selected quote

“	Art is a house that tries to be haunted.	”
—Emily Dickinson

Language corner

The pitch accent of Vedic Sanskrit, or Vedic accent for brevity, is traditionally divided by Sanskrit grammarians into three qualities, udātta "raised" ( acute accent), anudātta "not raised" ( grave accent) and svarita "sounded" ( circumflex). In the Rigveda, svarita is marked with a small upright stroke above a syllable and anudātta with a horizontal line below the syllable, while udātta remains unmarked.