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Poetry as an art form may predate literacy.〔http://www.yukon-news.com/arts/poet-goes-from-newsprint-to-verse/〕 The earliest poetry is believed to have been recited or sung, employed as a way of remembering oral history, genealogy, and law. Poetry is often closely related to musical traditions, and the earliest poetry exists in the form of hymns (such as the work of Sumerian priestess Enheduanna). Many of the poems surviving from the ancient world are recorded prayers, or stories about religious subject matter, but they also include historical accounts, instructions for everyday activities, love songs,〔http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/14/international/europe/14poem.html〕 and fiction. Many scholars, particularly those researching the Homeric tradition and the oral epics of the Balkans, suggest that early writing shows clear traces of older oral traditions, including the use of repeated phrases as building blocks in larger poetic units. A rhythmic and repetitious form would make a long story easier to remember and retell, before writing was available as an aide-memoire. Thus many ancient works, from the Vedas (1700 - 1200 BC) to the ''Odyssey'' (800 - 675 BC), appear to have been composed in poetic form to aid memorization and oral transmission, in prehistoric and ancient societies.〔For one recent summary discussion, see Frederick Ahl, ''The Odyssey Re-Formed'' (1996). Others suggest that poetry did not necessarily predate writing. See, for example, Jack Goody, ''The Interface Between the Written and the Oral'' (1987).〕 Poetry appears among the earliest records of most literate cultures, with poetic fragments found on early monoliths, runestones and stelae. The oldest surviving speculative fiction poem is the ''Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor'',〔UCSC Daniel Seldon Professor of AfroAsiatic studies〕 written in ''Hieratic'' and ascribed a date around 2500 B.C.E. Other sources ascribe the earliest written poetry to the ''Epic of Gilgamesh'' written in ''cuneiform''; however, it is most likely that ''The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor'' predates ''Gilgamesh'' by half a millennium. The oldest epic poetry besides the ''Epic of Gilgamesh'' are the Greek epics ''Iliad'' and ''Odyssey'' and the Indian Sanskrit epics ''Ramayana'' and ''Mahabharata''. The longest epic poems ever written were the ''Mahabharata'' and the Tibetan ''Epic of King Gesar''. Ancient thinkers sought to determine what makes poetry distinctive as a form and what distinguishes good poetry from bad, resulting in the development of "poetics", or the study of the aesthetics of poetry. Some ancient societies, such as the Chinese through the ''Classic of History'', one of the Five Classics, developed canons of poetic works that had ritual as well as aesthetic importance. More recently, thinkers struggled to find a definition that could encompass formal differences as great as those between Chaucer's ''The Canterbury Tales'' and Matsuo Bashō's Oku no Hosomichi, as well as differences in context that span from the religious poetry of the Tanakh to love poetry to rap.〔See, for example, Ribeiro, Anna Christina. 'Intending to Repeat: A Definition of Poetry'. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65:2, 2007.〕 Context can be critical to poetics and to the development of poetic genres and forms. For example, poetry employed to record historical events in epics, such as ''Gilgamesh'' or Ferdowsi's ''Shahnameh'',〔Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Dick Davis trans., ''Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings'' (2006) ISBN 0-670-03485-1〕 will necessarily be lengthy and narrative, while poetry used for liturgical purposes in hymns, psalms, suras and hadiths is likely to have an inspirational tone, whereas elegies and tragedy are intended to invoke deep internal emotional responses. Other contexts include music such as Gregorian chants, formal or diplomatic speech,〔For example, in the Arabic world, much diplomacy was carried out through poetic form in the 16th century. See ''Trickster's Travel's'', Natalie Zemon Davis (2006).〕 political rhetoric and invective,〔Examples of political invective include libel poetry and the classical epigrams of Martial and Catullus.〕 light-hearted nursery and nonsense rhymes, threnodies to the deceased and even medical texts.〔For example, many of Ibn Sina's medical texts were written in verse.〕 The Polish historian of aesthetics, Władysław Tatarkiewicz, in a paper on "The Concept of Poetry," traces the evolution of what is ''two concepts of poetry''. Tatarkiewicz points out that the term is applied to two distinct things that, as the poet Paul Valéry observes, "at a certain point find union. Poetry () is an art based on ''language.'' But poetry also has a more general meaning () that is difficult to define because it is less determinate: poetry expresses a certain ''state of mind.''" ==Classical and early modern Western traditions== Classical thinkers employed classification as a way to define and assess the quality of poetry. Notably, Aristotle's ''Poetics'' describes the three genres of poetry: the epic, comic, and tragic, and develops rules to distinguish the highest-quality poetry of each genre, based on the underlying purposes of that genre.〔''Aristotle's Poetics'', Heath (ed) 1997.〕 Later aestheticians identified three major genres: epic poetry, lyric poetry and dramatic poetry, treating comedy and tragedy as subgenres of dramatic poetry. Aristotle's work was influential throughout the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age,〔Ibn Rushd (Averroes) wrote a commentary on Aristotle's ''Poetics'', replacing the original examples with passages from Arabic poets. See for example, W. F. Boggess, 'Hermannus Alemannus' Latin Anthology of Arabic Poetry,' ''Journal of the American Oriental Society,'' 1968, Volume 88, 657-70, and Charles Burnett, 'Learned Knowledge of Arabic Poetry, Rhymed Prose, and Didactic Verse from Petrus Alfonsi to Petrarch', in ''Poetry and Philosophy in the Middle Ages: A Festschrift for Peter Dronke,'' 2001. ISBN 90-04-11964-7.〕 as well as in Europe during the Renaissance.〔See, for example, Paul F Grendler, ''The Universities of the Italian Renaissance,'' Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8018-8055-6 (for example, page 239) for the prominence of Aristotle and the ''Poetics'' on the Renaissance curriculum.〕 Later poets and aestheticians often distinguished poetry from, and defined it in opposition to, prose, which was generally understood as writing with a proclivity to logical explication and global trade. In addition to a boom in translation, during the Romantic period numerous ancient works were rediscovered. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of poetry」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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