Poetry

I love poetry but never really spend enough time either reading or writing poetry.

Poetry (from the Greek poiesis - ??????? - with a broad meaning of a "making", seen also in such terms as "hemopoiesis"; more narrowly, the making of poetry) is a form of literary art which uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language-such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre-to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning.

Poetry has a long history, dating back to the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Early poems evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing, or from a need to retell oral epics, as with the Sanskrit Vedas, Zoroastrian Gathas, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Ancient attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle's Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song and comedy. Later attempts concentrated on features such as repetition, verse form and rhyme, and emphasized the aesthetics which distinguish poetry from more objectively-informative, prosaic forms of writing. From the mid-20th century, poetry has sometimes been more generally regarded as a fundamental creative act employing language.

So what is your favourite poem then?