Of all literary forms, poetry is one of the most ancient. The oldest known poem is the Epic of Gilgamesh, which was inscribed on a total of 12 clay tablets of Mesopotamian origin, having been written out in Sumer around the third millennium BC! The fantastical tale tells the story of Gilgamesh — a part-man, part-god king — and his quest to achieve immortality. While other texts have been found to be as ancient or older than Gilgamesh’s story, this is the oldest known example of the poetic genre.
Yet, before having the instruments to write things down, humans resorted to oral tradition as the main way to retain and pass down cultural identity and the traditions it entailed. While it was not necessarily poetry in the stricter sense, repetition of the same information as it was relayed to others within the same community (and maybe even different communities) does give things a poetic sort of feeling, even when it came to retelling historical events, such as Homer’s Iliad, which told the story of the Trojan War.
Beyond just sharing core elements of a group, poetry grew to be used as more of a creative tool, as evidenced by the emergence of works such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer’s Odyssey, where people explored certain aspects of mythology and took more creative liberties to elaborate their own stories and expound on certain aspects of human nature.
With the progression of time, poetry as a literary style continued to evolve as more poets developed new writing methods and employed different rhyme schemes and structures. The versatility of poetry is certainly part of the draw this literary style has. Hundreds of formats, rhyme schemes, and the like have been developed over time. Poets have the freedom to express their ideas in a myriad of ways using the tools past poets have left them, or they can break away from all structures in favor of a more free-flowing, “structureless” style of writing. While poetry is definitely not my strong suit, I can see the appeal of having such a flexible writing style at my fingertips. Such few words can be used to describe the deepest, core parts of the human experience, and the emotional payoff can be remarkable.
For example, poets like Langston Hughes and Lola Rodríguez de Tió used their words to better define Black and Latino identities and struggles, respectively. Their work now serves as well-known shows of resistance in the face of discrimination and how poetry has shifted more towards being a tool to deliver political statements. If we wanted to refer to even more recently developed poetry, A Blade of Grass: New Palestinian Poetry is a 2017 anthology that gathers works pertaining to the ever-present Palestinian struggle from an intergenerational perspective.
Here’s the bottom line: poetry is an intergenerational way to express oneself and to share culture, history, and stories with others. Naturally, it has come to take many shapes over time and among different peoples, but the common desire to communicate and connect with others has remained strong since Gilgamesh’s tale was relayed back in Sumer many millennia ago.