What is poetry? What is it used for? Why do people do poetry?

Answer 1

Poetry is language as art.

The visual arts use visual media, paint, photographs, sculpture, etc. The musical arts use sound. Poetry uses Language. All express artistic visions and cultural truths.

The poetry of Shakespeare is more easily obtained than the paintings of Picasso, but requires as much study and inspiration to understand and appreciate.

And it is not only English, but every language in the world which is used as a poetic medium.

Here are 4 parts of some of the greatest poems in the world. In the English, you can appreciate the musicality of the lines and the beauty of the words. So too, it is true of the Russian and the Chinese.

"Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:"
-Shakespeare

"Let us go then, you and I
when the evening is spread out against the sky"
-Eliot

Белеет парус одинокий
В тумане моря голубом!..
Что ищет он в стране далекой?
Что кинул он в краю родном?..
-Lermentov

金樽清酒斗十千， 玉盤珍羞值萬錢。
停杯投箸不能食， 拔劍四顧心茫然。
欲渡黃河冰塞川， 將登太行雪暗天。
閑來垂釣碧溪上， 忽復乘舟夢日邊。
行路難！ 行路難！
多歧路， 今安在？
長風破浪會有時， 直挂雲帆濟滄海。
-Li Bai

You could also read Basho, Baudelaire, Rilke, Sappho, Whitman, Ferlinghetti, and many hundreds of others and you would encounter the same truth and beauty that is language as an art.

I hope you can learn and enjoy more poetry.

Answer 2

For one who has to ask the question, "What is poetry?" the question probably cannot be answered. One who knows what poetry is, probably cannot answer the question. One who answers the question in prose, probably does not know the answer.

Better let poets answer this question themselves, I think.

Archibald MacLeish famously wrote:
"A poem should not mean
But be."

But Marianne Moore went into more detail (sorry, Y!A doesn't retain the spacing of the lines on the page as they should be):

Poetry

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against "business documents and

school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
"literalists of
the imagination"--above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.

Oh, we can all talk about what the nature of poetry. To me, such talk would revolve around "insight into human experience," and "awareness of the expressiveness of language itself." But already this begins to sound like "the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse."

Poetry is.

Poetry is what poetry is.

Whatever poetry is is poetry.

(But you have to know that the meaning of is is.)

Answer 3

Poetry is cleansing of the soul. It is the deepest form of expression with words. A good poem can make you laugh, cry or think deeper then you ever knew you could. You can write a poem using the wind to describe how your emotions feel. I write to release pain, joy or mark a special occasion.

Answer 4

A)poetry is puke. B)It's used to splatter on peoples shoes.B) So they can get free shoe polish.

Answer 5

to make a rhyme scheme. in english class and people used it for to sing or rhyme things

Answer 6

Yes, I cut and pasted, but it's worth it and answers your question perfectly....

What is forgot these days — and it was forgot in other days, too — is the need to be affected by poetry. There has been much said about the writing of poetry, and much said about the appreciation of poetry; but not enough has been said about the possible effect of poetry. Poetry is a thing and does something. What it does, can do, should be looked at.
According to Aesthetic Realism, poetry is a picture of reality at its truest, most useful. We look at reality, we look at it mostly in a contradictory way. We are for it, and we retreat from it. It is, sometimes, most sweet concord; but how much discord do we feel in it! Reality hurts and pleases. It frightens and allures. It surprises and soothes. It shrieks and coos.

It happens that our deepest desire is to make sense of the contrarieties in this world. We cannot, safely, prefer the blandishing in reality, or what seems so, to the forbidding. Our purpose, when sound, is to see what's real entirely. We need to see reality as one thing, with discord present. We need this very much. Poetry meets this need.

However, in order to meet our need to see the world as one thing, through poetry, we must see poetry as what it is, not something else — not something occasionally imposed by a timid and arrogant personality. We need poetry, and so we need to see it; not something else.

When we are born we hope to make some sense of the forces in us. We want to move, and we want to be quiet; we want to assail and we want to be secluded; we want to be delighted, and we want to be self-satisfied; we want excitement and we want repose. All through life, really, we are trying to make jarring, separating propensities to act as one; we are trying to have forces coalesce in an other than languid oneness. And it is poetry that makes jarring, separating propensities to act as one; it is poetry that coalesces forces in a oneness that is not languid.

From this one may properly gather that the immediate need for poetry (also the permanent one) is to see it as a means of our own organization, strengthening, instigating. Poetry represents the good sense we desire. Poetry is the exacting shepherd of our emotions.

Poetry, though, means something to us the more it, as such, affects us. Within a poem are possibilities of being affected non-poetically, that is, wrongly. It is so easy, in some hidden way, to use a poem to soothe a darkly exacerbated personality, or to allay a discontent of ego, without organizing that personality or strengthening it.

We should find excitement and repose in a poem; from the poem itself. However, there can be a bad exchange in one's reading of a poem. A certain excitement is found in a poem because the reader's fears are stirred, but not so clearly as to mean much; in this way a spurious repose ensues. All this is difficult; but it is true that the activities taking place in a mind during the reading of a poem may be intricately soothing and subterranean.

Admitting then, asserting then, that there can be false effects got from poetry, we should consider the possible true effect. The words in a poem are composed; and we want composition. Composition is the friendly presence of oneness and diversity. Our immediate need for poetry is our need to be composed.

A poem is excitement and repose. Our immediate need for poetry is our need to use it as an encouragement to have excitement and repose in ourselves. There are quietude and mobility in a poem. Our immediate need for poetry is our need to use an example of quietude and mobility.

This means that there are qualities in Coleridge's "Christabel" that we want for ourselves. There are dreaminess and precision in the poem of Coleridge. We need these. If we honor them in "Christabel," we call for them in ourselves. There are firmness and flexibility in the lines of Pope's "Rape of the Lock." Firmness and flexibility are of the very poetry in this eighteenth-century work. If we see the poem, therefore, we advocate firmness and flexibility in ourselves. There are wonder and exactness in Rimbaud's "O saisons, O chateaux." If we see the poem rightly, we befriend wonder and exactness in ourselves.

Poetry, then, is a beautiful necessity; a beautiful heightener, organizer, impetus, example. Poetry enables us to see reality where it starts; it enables us, also, to see reality as a process, and reality as purpose. The way beginning, process, and conclusion cohere in a poem is a picture of how we want to see reality and ourselves.

The agonies of the person are present in the technique of the poem. The swiftness and slowness of the poetic line; the smoothness and surprise of the poetic phrase; the rightness and wonder of the word used poetically, are answers to the desires of men and women. And they are the reason for poetry; they are the qualities that are immediately and permanently needed.

Some of my poetry....

I am sad.
I lost something I never had.


(and)


the long awaited sadness
finally pierced my heart,
and i...
thought there’d be more.

Answer 7

to express there feelings