Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used
for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content.
It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is
felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose.
It may use condensed or compressed form to convey emotion or ideas to the reader's or
listener's mind or ear; it may also use devices such as assonance and repetition to achieve
musical or incantatory effects. Poems frequently rely for their effect on imagery, word
association, and the musical qualities of the language used. The interactive layering of all
these effects to generate meaning is what marks poetry.
Because of its nature of emphasising linguistic form rather than using language purely for its
content, poetry is notoriously difficult to translate from one language into another: a
possible exception to this might be the Hebrew Psalms, where the beauty is found more in the
balance of ideas than in specific vocabulary. In most poetry, it is the connotations and the
"baggage" that words carry (the weight of words) that are most important. These shades and
nuances of meaning can be difficult to interpret and can cause different readers to "hear" a
particular piece of poetry differently. While there are reasonable interpretations, there can
never be a definitive interpretation.
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