Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry as an art form predates written text, with the earliest poetry having been recited or sung, and employed as a way of remembering oral history. The oldest examples of epic poetry include the Epic of Gilgamesh from Bablylon and the Greek epics The Iliad and The Odyssey, and the Indian Sanskrit epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata. The longest epic poems in history were the Mahabharata and the Tibetan Epic of King Gesar. Aristotle's Poetics considered that there were three genres of poetry-the epic, the comic, and the tragic. Later aestheticians identified: epic poetry, lyric poetry, and dramatic poetry. One of the most popular form since the Late Middle Ages, is the sonnet, which by the 13th century had become standardized as fourteen lines following a set rhyme scheme. The form had crystallized further by the 14th century and the Italian Renaissance, under the guidance of Petrarch.
