With language came poetry, the music of the spoken and written word. Rhyme and rhythm were among the earliest methods of encoding and transmitting information, yet when the advent of written culture freed poetry from its mnemonic function, the finest poems... [more]

With language came poetry, the music of the spoken and written word. Rhyme and rhythm were among the earliest methods of encoding and transmitting information, yet when the advent of written culture freed poetry from its mnemonic function, the finest poems became, if anything, more memorable, more seductive, more evocative. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw a great flowering of European vernacular languages as the great poets abandoned Latin. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Elizabethans and Jacobeans were using iambic pentameter to exaggerate -- and only slightly -- the song that is spoken English. At this point, poetry began to assume its modern form as the gold mine in which previously unimagined forms of expression are brought for the first time to the light. Beauty became, as one great practitioner observed, a form of truth -- to put it another way, anything described with sufficient beauty could conceivably be passed off as true. Poets are indeed, in this sense, kin to legislators and propagandists. Yet as the most powerful and disciplined of twentieth-century poets found, truth is its own kind of beauty. In the twentieth century, Grecian urns have given way to red wheelbarrows and Irish bogs as the research and development arm of literature reasserts its faith in the lyricism of the everyday. [show less]