Literature is art. Poetry is the art of the word. There are many forms of art: verbal, sound, plastic, gestural, etc. Poetry and literary prose, like narrative, for example, are verbal arts.
The various musical styles and rhythms make up the sound art. In turn, drawing, painting, photography, printing and sculpture are visual or plastic arts. The various types of dance are sign arts. According to an old definition, the plastic arts are “silent poetry”. Indeed, the various forms of art give expression to human imagination and technical skill. It is important to point out that art without poetry does not exist. Mário Quintana, a Brazilian poet, used to say, “all the arts are different manifestations of poetry.”
Thus, poetry is a creative form of expression that can be manifested in many ways, not only through verse. Poetry is one of the oldest literary expressions of humanity. In the ancient world, poetry was sung with instrumental accompaniment, on flute or lyre. Hence the name “lyrical poetry”. The sounds of the words and the rhythm of the lines make up the music of the poem. The poem has rhythms, cadences, and sounds that speak to our deepest emotions and feelings.
When we read a poem out loud, we can perceive its rhythm. Repetition is the basis of rhythm. Reading aloud is called interpretive reading. The poet has several resources for the construction of rhythm: the length of the lines or poetic lines, the use of rhymes (identity of sounds at the end of words), the accent (strong syllables X weak syllables), repetitions of vowel sounds (assonances) or consonant groups (alliterations), the meeting of vowels, the strophic combination, etc.
The line is each line of meaning that makes up the poem. There are authors who write poems with a single line. For example, Jules Laforgue (1860-1887), when writing about the summer cicada, says: “L’insecticide net scratches dryness…” (in free translation: “The crisp insect scratches dryness…”). In a poem, the lines are grouped into stanzas or stanzas (this word comes from the Italian stanza and means ‘room’), in lines that follow the poetic rhythm. Thus, in poetry, words create lines, lines create stanzas, and stanzas create poems. In a story, the sentences are arranged in paragraphs, in straight lines. Words create sentences, sentences create paragraphs, and paragraphs create text.
There are two main types of verse: traditional or orthodox verse, that is, rhymed and regular verse, which obeys fixed rules of metrification (such as syllable count or stanza format), and modern or free verse. In reality, it is difficult to define free verse since it can be both uniform and free, that is, more “loose”. The obvious but not essential feature is that it dispenses with rhyme. Free verse seems more open to the anxieties and anxieties of modernity. However, in our modern poetry rhyme has never been abandoned.