Poetry has been around for almost four thousand years. Like other forms of literature, poetry is written to share ideas, express emotions, and create imagery. Poets choose words for their meaning and acoustics, arranging them to create a tempo known as the meter. Some poems incorporate rhyme schemes, with two or more lines that end in like-sounding words. Poetry is a vast subject, as old as history and older, present wherever religion is present, possibly—under some definitions—the primal and primary form of languages themselves. The present article means only to describe in as general a way as possible certain properties of poetry and of poetic thought regarded as in some sense independent modes of the mind.
