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122-401: A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry . Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker , songwriter , writer , or author ) who creates (composes) poems ( oral or written ), or they may also perform their art to an audience . The work of a poet is essentially one of communication, expressing ideas either in
244-622: A synonym (a metonym ) for poetry. Poetry has a long and varied history , evolving differentially across the globe. It dates back at least to prehistoric times with hunting poetry in Africa and to panegyric and elegiac court poetry of the empires of the Nile , Niger , and Volta River valleys. Some of the earliest written poetry in Africa occurs among the Pyramid Texts written during
366-516: A career as a poet, they can be helpful as training, and for giving the student several years of time focused on their writing. Lyrical poets who write sacred poetry (" hymnographers ") differ from the usual image of poets in a number of ways. A hymnographer such as Isaac Watts who wrote 700 poems in his lifetime, may have their lyrics sung by millions of people every Sunday morning, but are not always included in anthologies of poetry . Because hymns are perceived of as " worship " rather than "poetry",
488-400: A characteristic metrical foot and the number of feet per line. The number of metrical feet in a line are described using Greek terminology: tetrameter for four feet and hexameter for six feet, for example. Thus, " iambic pentameter " is a meter comprising five feet per line, in which the predominant kind of foot is the " iamb ". This metric system originated in ancient Greek poetry , and
610-435: A common meter alone. Other poems may be organized into verse paragraphs , in which regular rhymes with established rhythms are not used, but the poetic tone is instead established by a collection of rhythms, alliterations, and rhymes established in paragraph form. Many medieval poems were written in verse paragraphs, even where regular rhymes and rhythms were used. In many forms of poetry, stanzas are interlocking, so that
732-549: A critique of poetic tradition, testing the principle of euphony itself or altogether forgoing rhyme or set rhythm. Poets – as, from the Greek , "makers" of language – have contributed to the evolution of the linguistic, expressive, and utilitarian qualities of their languages. In an increasingly globalized world, poets often adapt forms, styles, and techniques from diverse cultures and languages. A Western cultural tradition (extending at least from Homer to Rilke ) associates
854-577: A definition that could encompass formal differences as great as those between Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Matsuo Bashō 's Oku no Hosomichi , as well as differences in content spanning Tanakh religious poetry , love poetry, and rap . Until recently, the earliest examples of stressed poetry had been thought to be works composed by Romanos the Melodist ( fl. 6th century CE). However, Tim Whitmarsh writes that an inscribed Greek poem predated Romanos' stressed poetry. Classical thinkers in
976-727: A given foot or line and to avoid boring repetition. For example, the stress in a foot may be inverted, a caesura (or pause) may be added (sometimes in place of a foot or stress), or the final foot in a line may be given a feminine ending to soften it or be replaced by a spondee to emphasize it and create a hard stop. Some patterns (such as iambic pentameter) tend to be fairly regular, while other patterns, such as dactylic hexameter, tend to be highly irregular. Regularity can vary between language. In addition, different patterns often develop distinctively in different languages, so that, for example, iambic tetrameter in Russian will generally reflect
1098-401: A key part of their structure, so that the metrical pattern determines when the listener expects instances of alliteration to occur. This can be compared to an ornamental use of alliteration in most Modern European poetry, where alliterative patterns are not formal or carried through full stanzas. Alliteration is particularly useful in languages with less rich rhyming structures. Assonance, where
1220-410: A literal sense (such as communicating about a specific event or place) or metaphorically . Poets have existed since prehistory , in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary greatly in different cultures and periods. Throughout each civilization and language, poets have used various styles that have changed over time, resulting in countless poets as diverse as the literature that (since
1342-416: A meaning separate from the repetitive sound patterns created. For example, Chaucer used heavy alliteration to mock Old English verse and to paint a character as archaic. Rhyme consists of identical ("hard-rhyme") or similar ("soft-rhyme") sounds placed at the ends of lines or at locations within lines (" internal rhyme "). Languages vary in the richness of their rhyming structures; Italian, for example, has
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#17327656239421464-674: A number of poets, including William Shakespeare and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , respectively. The most common metrical feet in English are: There are a wide range of names for other types of feet, right up to a choriamb , a four syllable metric foot with a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables and closing with a stressed syllable. The choriamb is derived from some ancient Greek and Latin poetry . Languages which use vowel length or intonation rather than or in addition to syllabic accents in determining meter, such as Ottoman Turkish or Vedic , often have concepts similar to
1586-579: A pharmacist's guild and William Shakespeare 's work in the theater. In the Romantic period and onwards, many poets were independent writers who made their living through their work, often supplemented by income from other occupations or from family. This included poets such as William Wordsworth and Robert Burns . Poets such as Virgil in the Aeneid and John Milton in Paradise Lost invoked
1708-426: A poem. For example, the strophe , antistrophe and epode of the ode form are often separated into one or more stanzas. Arabian Peninsula The Arabian Peninsula ( / ə ˈ r eɪ b i ə n p ə n ɪ n sj u l ə / ; Arabic : شِبْهُ الْجَزِيرَة الْعَرَبِيَّة , shibhu l-jazīra l-ʿarabiyya , "Arabian Peninsula" or جَزِيرَةُ الْعَرَب , jazīratu l-ʿarab , lit. ' Island of
1830-420: A process known as lineation . These lines may be based on the number of metrical feet or may emphasize a rhyming pattern at the ends of lines. Lines may serve other functions, particularly where the poem is not written in a formal metrical pattern. Lines can separate, compare or contrast thoughts expressed in different units, or can highlight a change in tone. See the article on line breaks for information about
1952-473: A regularity in the use of accents to reinforce the meter, which does not occur, or occurs to a much lesser extent, in English. Some common metrical patterns, with notable examples of poets and poems who use them, include: Rhyme, alliteration, assonance and consonance are ways of creating repetitive patterns of sound. They may be used as an independent structural element in a poem, to reinforce rhythmic patterns, or as an ornamental element. They can also carry
2074-693: A resonance between otherwise disparate images—a layering of meanings, forming connections previously not perceived. Kindred forms of resonance may exist, between individual verses , in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm. Some poetry types are unique to particular cultures and genres and respond to characteristics of the language in which the poet writes. Readers accustomed to identifying poetry with Dante , Goethe , Mickiewicz , or Rumi may think of it as written in lines based on rhyme and regular meter . There are, however, traditions, such as Biblical poetry and alliterative verse , that use other means to create rhythm and euphony . Much modern poetry reflects
2196-430: A rich rhyming structure permitting maintenance of a limited set of rhymes throughout a lengthy poem. The richness results from word endings that follow regular forms. English, with its irregular word endings adopted from other languages, is less rich in rhyme. The degree of richness of a language's rhyming structures plays a substantial role in determining what poetic forms are commonly used in that language. Alliteration
2318-414: A sentence without putting the sound only at the front of a word. Consonance provokes a more subtle effect than alliteration and so is less useful as a structural element. In many languages, including Arabic and modern European languages, poets use rhyme in set patterns as a structural element for specific poetic forms, such as ballads , sonnets and rhyming couplets . However, the use of structural rhyme
2440-468: A series of more subtle, more flexible prosodic elements. Thus poetry remains, in all its styles, distinguished from prose by form; some regard for basic formal structures of poetry will be found in all varieties of free verse, however much such structures may appear to have been ignored. Similarly, in the best poetry written in classic styles there will be departures from strict form for emphasis or effect. Among major structural elements used in poetry are
2562-782: A small number of urban trading settlements, such as Mecca and Medina , located in the Hejaz in the west of the peninsula. Archaeology has revealed the existence of many civilizations in pre-Islamic Arabia (such as the Thamud ), especially in South Arabia . South Arabian civilizations include the Himyarite Kingdom , the Kingdom of Awsan , the Kingdom of Ma'īn , and the Sabaean Kingdom (usually considered to be
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#17327656239422684-793: Is Saudi Arabia. In the classical era, the Sinai Peninsula was also considered a part of Arabia. The Arabian Peninsula formed as a result of the rifting of the Red Sea between 56 and 23 million years ago, and is bordered by the Red Sea to the west and southwest, the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman to the northeast, the Levant and Mesopotamia to the north and the Arabian Sea and
2806-552: Is a large volcanic field that extends from northwestern Arabia into Jordan and southern Syria . The Peninsula's constituent countries are (clockwise from north to south) Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on the east, Oman on the southeast, Yemen on the south, and Saudi Arabia at the center. The island country of Bahrain lies just off the east coast of the Peninsula. Due to Yemen's jurisdiction over
2928-404: Is an attempt to render the beautiful or sublime without the burden of engaging the logical or narrative thought-process. English Romantic poet John Keats termed this escape from logic " negative capability ". This "romantic" approach views form as a key element of successful poetry because form is abstract and distinct from the underlying notional logic. This approach remained influential into
3050-457: Is called a poem and is written by a poet . Poets use a variety of techniques called poetic devices, such as assonance , alliteration , euphony and cacophony , onomatopoeia , rhythm (via metre ), and sound symbolism , to produce musical or other artistic effects. Most written poems are formatted in verse : a series or stack of lines on a page, which follow a rhythmic or other deliberate structure. For this reason, verse has also become
3172-593: Is considered to be one of the official Confucian classics . His remarks on the subject have become an invaluable source in ancient music theory . The efforts of ancient thinkers to determine what makes poetry distinctive as a form, and what distinguishes good poetry from bad, resulted in " poetics "—the study of the aesthetics of poetry. Some ancient societies, such as China's through the Shijing , developed canons of poetic works that had ritual as well as aesthetic importance. More recently, thinkers have struggled to find
3294-614: Is known for its rich oil, i.e. petroleum production due to its geographical location. According to NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite data (2003–2013) analysed in a University of California, Irvine (UCI) -led study published in Water Resources Research on 16 June 2015, the most over-stressed aquifer system in the world is the Arabian Aquifer System , upon which more than 60 million people depend for water. Twenty-one of
3416-766: Is located in the continent of Asia and is bounded by (clockwise) the Persian Gulf on the northeast, the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman on the east, the Arabian Sea on the southeast, the Gulf of Aden , and the Guardafui Channel on the south, and the Bab-el-Mandeb strait on the southwest and the Red Sea, which is located on the southwest and west. The northern portion of the peninsula merges with
3538-451: Is most often founded on the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables (alone or elided ). In the classical languages , on the other hand, while the metrical units are similar, vowel length rather than stresses define the meter. Old English poetry used a metrical pattern involving varied numbers of syllables but a fixed number of strong stresses in each line. The chief device of ancient Hebrew Biblical poetry , including many of
3660-645: Is not universal even within the European tradition. Much modern poetry avoids traditional rhyme schemes . Classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use rhyme. Rhyme entered European poetry in the High Middle Ages , due to the influence of the Arabic language in Al Andalus . Arabic language poets used rhyme extensively not only with the development of literary Arabic in the sixth century , but also with
3782-529: Is perceived. Languages can rely on either pitch or tone. Some languages with a pitch accent are Vedic Sanskrit or Ancient Greek. Tonal languages include Chinese, Vietnamese and most Subsaharan languages . Metrical rhythm generally involves precise arrangements of stresses or syllables into repeated patterns called feet within a line. In Modern English verse the pattern of stresses primarily differentiate feet, so rhythm based on meter in Modern English
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3904-669: Is the location of the Kaaba , Islam's holiest site, and the Masjid al-Nabawi (the Prophet's Mosque) in Medina is the location of Muhammad 's grave; as a result, from the 7th century, Mecca and Medina became the pilgrimage destinations for large numbers of Muslims from across the Islamic world . Despite its spiritual importance, in political terms Arabia soon became a peripheral region of
4026-409: Is the repetition of letters or letter-sounds at the beginning of two or more words immediately succeeding each other, or at short intervals; or the recurrence of the same letter in accented parts of words. Alliteration and assonance played a key role in structuring early Germanic, Norse and Old English forms of poetry. The alliterative patterns of early Germanic poetry interweave meter and alliteration as
4148-407: Is the speaker, not the poet, who is the killer (unless this "confession" is a form of metaphor which needs to be considered in closer context – via close reading ). Some scholars believe that the art of poetry may predate literacy , and developed from folk epics and other oral genres. Others, however, suggest that poetry did not necessarily predate writing. The oldest surviving epic poem,
4270-407: Is unsuited to agriculture, making irrigation and land reclamation projects essential. The narrow coastal plain and isolated oases, amounting to less than 1% of the land area, are used to cultivate grains, coffee and tropical fruits . Goat, sheep, and camel husbandry is widespread elsewhere throughout the rest of the Peninsula. Some areas have a summer humid tropical monsoon climate , in particular
4392-587: The Epic of Gilgamesh , dates from the 3rd millennium BCE in Sumer (in Mesopotamia , present-day Iraq ), and was written in cuneiform script on clay tablets and, later, on papyrus . The Istanbul tablet#2461 , dating to c. 2000 BCE, describes an annual rite in which the king symbolically married and mated with the goddess Inanna to ensure fertility and prosperity; some have labelled it
4514-739: The Al Saud , began in Najd in central Arabia in 1744, when Muhammad bin Saud , founder of the dynasty, joined forces with the religious leader Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab , founder of the Wahhabi movement , a strict puritanical form of Sunni Islam. The Emirate of Diriyah established in the area around Riyadh rapidly expanded and briefly controlled most of the present-day territory of Saudi Arabia, sacking Karbala in 1802, and capturing Mecca in 1803. The Damascus Protocol of 1914 provides an illustration of
4636-1111: The Arabian Peninsula , and mock battles in poetry or zajal would stand in lieu of real wars. 'Ukaz, a market town not far from Mecca , would play host to a regular poetry festival where the craft of the sha'irs would be exhibited. Poets of earlier times were often well read and highly educated people while others were to a large extent self-educated. A few poets such as John Gower and John Milton were able to write poetry in more than one language. Some Portuguese poets, as Francisco de Sá de Miranda , wrote not only in Portuguese but also in Spanish. Jan Kochanowski wrote in Polish and in Latin, France Prešeren and Karel Hynek Mácha wrote some poems in German, although they were poets of Slovenian and Czech respectively. Adam Mickiewicz ,
4758-788: The Arabs ' ), or Arabia , is a peninsula in West Asia , situated northeast of Africa on the Arabian Plate . At 3,237,500 km (1,250,000 sq mi), comparable in size to India , the Arabian Peninsula is the largest peninsula in the world. Geographically, the Arabian Peninsula includes Bahrain , Kuwait , Oman , Qatar , Saudi Arabia , the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Yemen , as well as southern Iraq and Jordan . The largest of these
4880-455: The Dhofar and Al Mahrah areas of Oman and Yemen. These areas allow for large scale coconut plantations. Much of Yemen has a tropical monsoon rain influenced mountain climate. The plains usually have either a tropical or subtropical arid desert climate or arid steppe climate . The sea surrounding the Arabian Peninsula is generally tropical sea with a very rich tropical sea life and some of
5002-597: The First Islamic State - a single Arab Muslim religious polity in the Arabian Peninsula. Under the subsequent Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates , rapid expansion of Arab power well beyond the Arabian peninsula formed a vast Muslim Arab Empire with an area of influence that stretched from the northwest Indian subcontinent , across Central Asia , the Middle East , North Africa , southern Italy , and
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5124-585: The Hejaz ( Tihamah for the western coast), as described by Ibn al-Faqih . In antiquity, the term "Arabia" encompassed a larger area than the current term "Arabian Peninsula" and included the Arabian desert and large parts of the Syrian-Arabian desert . During the Hellenistic period , the area was known as Arabia ( Ancient Greek : Ἀραβία ). The Romans named three regions "Arabia": One of
5246-721: The Iberian Peninsula , to the Pyrenees . With Muhammad's death in 632, disagreement broke out over who would succeed him as leader of the Muslim community. Umar ibn al-Khattab , a prominent companion of Muhammad, nominated Abu Bakr , who was Muhammad's intimate friend and collaborator. Others added their support and Abu Bakr was made the first caliph . This choice was disputed by some of Muhammad's companions, who held that Ali ibn Abi Talib , his cousin and son-in-law, had been designated his successor. Abu Bakr's immediate task
5368-581: The Indian Ocean to the southeast. The peninsula plays a critical geopolitical role in the Arab world and globally due to its vast reserves of oil and natural gas . Before the modern era, the region was divided into primarily four distinct regions: the Central Plateau ( Najd and Al-Yamama ), South Arabia ( Yemen , Hadhramaut and Oman ), Al-Bahrain (Eastern Arabia or Al-Hassa ), and
5490-497: The Islamic world , in which the most important medieval Islamic states were based at various times in such far away cities as Damascus , Baghdad , and Cairo . However, from the 10th century (and, in fact, until the 20th century) the Hashemite Sharifs of Mecca maintained a state in the most developed part of the region, the Hejaz . Their domain originally comprised only the holy cities of Mecca and Medina but in
5612-637: The Nefud Desert dates to approximately 90,000 years ago and is the oldest human fossil discovered outside of Africa and the Levant. This indicates human migrations from Africa to Arabia occurred around this time. The Arabian Peninsula may have been the homeland of a ' Basal Eurasian ' population, which diverged from other Eurasians soon after the Out-of-Africa migration, and subsequently became isolated, until it started to mix with other populations in
5734-759: The Rashidun or "rightly guided" Caliphate . Under the Rashidun Caliphs, and, from 661, their Umayyad successors , the Arabs rapidly expanded the territory under Muslim control outside of Arabia. In a matter of decades Muslim armies decisively defeated the Byzantine army and destroyed the Persian Empire , conquering huge swathes of territory from the Iberian peninsula to India. The political focus of
5856-742: The Socotra Archipelago , the Peninsula's geopolitical outline faces the Guardafui Channel and the Somali Sea to the south. The six countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE form the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia covers the greater part of the Peninsula. The majority of the population of the Peninsula lives in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The Peninsula contains
5978-466: The Syrian Desert with no clear borderline, although the northern boundary of the peninsula is generally considered to be the northern borders of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, also southern regions of Iraq and Jordan. The most prominent feature of the peninsula is desert , but in the southwest, there are mountain ranges, which receive greater rainfall than the rest of the peninsula. Harrat ash Shaam
6100-703: The Tamil language , had rigid grammars (to the point that they could be expressed as a context-free grammar ) which ensured a rhythm. Classical Chinese poetics , based on the tone system of Middle Chinese , recognized two kinds of tones: the level (平 píng ) tone and the oblique (仄 zè ) tones, a category consisting of the rising (上 sháng ) tone, the departing (去 qù ) tone and the entering (入 rù ) tone. Certain forms of poetry placed constraints on which syllables were required to be level and which oblique. The formal patterns of meter used in Modern English verse to create rhythm no longer dominate contemporary English poetry. In
6222-513: The Tuwayr , Shammar and Dhofar generally do not exceed 1,000 m (3,300 ft) in height. Not all mountains in the peninsula are visibly within ranges. Jebel Hafeet in particular, on the border of the UAE and Oman, measuring between 1,100 and 1,300 m (3,600 and 4,300 ft), is not within the Hajar range, but may be considered an outlier of that range. Most of the Arabian Peninsula
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#17327656239426344-472: The United States –led 2003 invasion of Iraq . Despite its historically sparse population, political Arabia stands out for its rapid population growth, driven by both significant inflows of migrant labor and persistently high birth rates. The population is characterized by its relative youth and a heavily skewed gender ratio favoring males. In several states, the number of South Asians surpasses that of
6466-591: The West employed classification as a way to define and assess the quality of poetry. Notably, the existing fragments of Aristotle 's Poetics describe three genres of poetry—the epic, the comic, and the tragic—and develop rules to distinguish the highest-quality poetry in each genre, based on the perceived underlying purposes of the genre. Later aestheticians identified three major genres: epic poetry, lyric poetry , and dramatic poetry , treating comedy and tragedy as subgenres of dramatic poetry. Aristotle's work
6588-464: The nomes of Ptolemaic Egypt was named Arabia . Arabians used a north–south division of Arabia: ash-Sham vs. al-Yaman , or Arabia Deserta vs. Arabia Felix . Arabia Felix had originally been used for the whole peninsula, and at other times only for the southern region. Because its use became limited to the south, the whole peninsula was simply called Arabia. Arabia Deserta was the entire desert region extending north from Arabia Felix to Palmyra and
6710-519: The psalms , was parallelism , a rhetorical structure in which successive lines reflected each other in grammatical structure, sound structure, notional content, or all three. Parallelism lent itself to antiphonal or call-and-response performance, which could also be reinforced by intonation . Thus, Biblical poetry relies much less on metrical feet to create rhythm, but instead creates rhythm based on much larger sound units of lines, phrases and sentences. Some classical poetry forms, such as Venpa of
6832-608: The scanning of poetic lines to show meter. The methods for creating poetic rhythm vary across languages and between poetic traditions. Languages are often described as having timing set primarily by accents , syllables , or moras , depending on how rhythm is established, although a language can be influenced by multiple approaches. Japanese is a mora -timed language. Latin , Catalan , French , Leonese , Galician and Spanish are called syllable-timed languages. Stress-timed languages include English , Russian and, generally, German . Varying intonation also affects how rhythm
6954-437: The "a-bc" convention, such as the ottava rima and terza rima . The types and use of differing rhyming schemes are discussed further in the main article . Poetic form is more flexible in modernist and post-modernist poetry and continues to be less structured than in previous literary eras. Many modern poets eschew recognizable structures or forms and write in free verse . Free verse is, however, not "formless" but composed of
7076-655: The 13th century it was extended to include the rest of the Hejaz . Although, the Sharifs exercised at most times independent authority in the Hejaz , they were usually subject to the suzerainty of one of the major Islamic empires of the time. In the Middle Ages, these included the Abbasids of Baghdad , and the Fatimids , Ayyubids , and Mamluks of Egypt . The provincial Ottoman Army for Arabia (Arabistan Ordusu)
7198-463: The 20th century. During the 18th and 19th centuries, there was also substantially more interaction among the various poetic traditions, in part due to the spread of European colonialism and the attendant rise in global trade. In addition to a boom in translation , during the Romantic period numerous ancient works were rediscovered. Some 20th-century literary theorists rely less on the ostensible opposition of prose and poetry, instead focusing on
7320-425: The 25th century BCE. The earliest surviving Western Asian epic poem , the Epic of Gilgamesh , was written in the Sumerian language . Early poems in the Eurasian continent evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing as well as from religious hymns (the Sanskrit Rigveda , the Zoroastrian Gathas , the Hurrian songs , and the Hebrew Psalms ); or from a need to retell oral epics, as with
7442-417: The Egyptian Story of Sinuhe , Indian epic poetry , and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey . Ancient Greek attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle 's Poetics , focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric , drama , song , and comedy . Later attempts concentrated on features such as repetition , verse form , and rhyme , and emphasized aesthetics which distinguish poetry from
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#17327656239427564-466: The Euphrates, including all the area between Pelusium on the Nile and Babylon. This area was also called Arabia and not sharply distinguished from the peninsula. The Arabs and the Ottoman Empire considered the west of the Arabian Peninsula region where the Arabs lived 'the land of the Arabs' – Bilad al-'Arab ( Arabia ), and its major divisions were the bilad al-Sham ( Levant ), bilad al-Yaman ( Yemen ), and Bilad al-'Iraq ( Iraq ). The Ottomans used
7686-445: The Gulf Cooperation Council's mediation. He eventually handed power to Vice President Hadi, who was sworn in as President of Yemen on 25 February 2012. Hadi launched a national dialogue to address new constitutional, political and social issues. The Houthi movement , dissatisfied with the outcomes of the national dialogue, launched an offensive and stormed the Yemeni capital Sanaa on 21 September 2014. In response, Saudi Arabia launched
7808-415: The Indian Sanskrit -language Rigveda , the Avestan Gathas , the Hurrian songs , and the Hebrew Psalms , possibly developed directly from folk songs . The earliest entries in the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry , the Classic of Poetry ( Shijing ), were initially lyrics . The Shijing, with its collection of poems and folk songs, was heavily valued by the philosopher Confucius and
7930-416: The Middle East since around 25,000 years ago. These different Middle Eastern populations would later spread Basal Eurasian ancestry via the Neolithic Revolution to all of Western Eurasia. There is evidence that human habitation in the Arabian Peninsula dates back to about 106,000 to 130,000 years ago. The harsh climate historically prevented much settlement in the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula, apart from
8052-459: The Muslim world then shifted to the newly conquered territories. Nevertheless, Mecca and Medina remained the spiritually most important places in the Muslim world . The Qur'an requires every able-bodied Muslim who can afford it, as one of the five pillars of Islam , to make a pilgrimage, or Hajj , to Mecca during the Islamic month of Dhu al-Hijjah at least once in his or her lifetime. The Masjid al-Haram (the Grand Mosque) in Mecca
8174-403: The Saudi Arabian border and rallied popular support. The royalist side received support from Saudi Arabia, while the republicans were supported by Egypt and the Soviet Union. Both foreign irregular and conventional forces were also involved. The Egyptian President , Gamal Abdel Nasser , supported the republicans with as many as 70,000 troops. Despite several military moves and peace conferences,
8296-422: The advent of writing systems) they have produced. The civilization of Sumer figures prominently in the history of early poetry, and The Epic of Gilgamesh , a widely read epic poem, was written in the Third Dynasty of Ur c. 2100 BC; copies of the poem continued to be published and written until c. 600 to 150 BC. However, as it arises from an oral tradition , the poet is unknown. The Story of Sinuhe
8418-403: The aid of a Muse . Poets held an important position in pre-Islamic Arabic society with the poet or sha'ir filling the role of historian, soothsayer and propagandist. Words in praise of the tribe ( qit'ah ) and lampoons denigrating other tribes ( hija' ) seem to have been some of the most popular forms of early poetry. The sha'ir represented an individual tribe's prestige and importance in
8540-461: The biblical land of Sheba ). From 106 AD to 630 AD northwestern Arabia was under the control of the Roman Empire , which renamed it Arabia Petraea . Central Arabia was the location of the Kingdom of Kinda in the 4th, 5th and early 6th centuries. Eastern Arabia was home to the Dilmun civilization . The earliest known events in Arabian history are migrations from the peninsula into neighbouring areas. The Arabian Peninsula has long been accepted as
8662-409: The biggest ongoing threat believed to be coastal construction activity altering the marine environment. The fertile soils of Yemen have encouraged settlement of almost all of the land from sea level up to the mountains at 10,000 feet (3,000 m). In the higher elevations, elaborate terraces have been constructed to facilitate grain, fruit, coffee, ginger and khat cultivation. The Arabian peninsula
8784-504: The case of free verse , rhythm is often organized based on looser units of cadence rather than a regular meter. Robinson Jeffers , Marianne Moore , and William Carlos Williams are three notable poets who reject the idea that regular accentual meter is critical to English poetry. Jeffers experimented with sprung rhythm as an alternative to accentual rhythm. In the Western poetic tradition, meters are customarily grouped according to
8906-608: The complex cultural web within which a poem is read. Today, throughout the world, poetry often incorporates poetic form and diction from other cultures and from the past, further confounding attempts at definition and classification that once made sense within a tradition such as the Western canon . The early 21st-century poetic tradition appears to continue to strongly orient itself to earlier precursor poetic traditions such as those initiated by Whitman , Emerson , and Wordsworth . The literary critic Geoffrey Hartman (1929–2016) used
9028-444: The division between lines. Lines of poems are often organized into stanzas , which are denominated by the number of lines included. Thus a collection of two lines is a couplet (or distich ), three lines a triplet (or tercet ), four lines a quatrain , and so on. These lines may or may not relate to each other by rhyme or rhythm. For example, a couplet may be two lines with identical meters which rhyme or two lines held together by
9150-573: The east) constituting only a quarter of people aged between 20 and 40. The eleven most populous cities on the Arabian Peninsula are: The rocks exposed vary systematically across Arabia, with the oldest rocks exposed in the Arabian-Nubian Shield near the Red Sea, overlain by earlier sediments that become younger towards the Persian Gulf. Perhaps the best-preserved ophiolite on Earth, the Semail Ophiolite , lies exposed in
9272-530: The eastern Al-Qassim Province , which would indicate that many prehistoric sites, located along a network of rivers, had once existed in the area. Acheulean tools found in Saffaqah, Riyadh Region reveal that hominins lived in the Arabian Peninsula around 188,000 years ago. Human habitation in Arabia may have occurred as early as 130,000 years ago. A fossilized Homo sapiens finger bone found at Al Wusta in
9394-603: The eastern, southern and northwestern borders of the peninsula. Broadly, the ranges can be grouped as follows: From the Hejaz southwards, the mountains show a steady increase in altitude westward as they get nearer to Yemen, and the highest peaks and ranges are all located in Yemen. The highest, Jabal An-Nabi Shu'ayb or Jabal Hadhur of the Haraz subrange of the Sarawat range, is 3,666 metres (12,028 ft) high. By comparison,
9516-557: The first Augustus for one of his poems. During the High Middle Ages , troubadors were an important class of poets. They came from a variety of backgrounds, often living and traveling in many different places and were looked upon as actors or musicians as much as poets. Some were under patronage, but many traveled extensively. The Renaissance period saw a continuation of patronage of poets by royalty. Many poets, however, had other sources of income, including Italians like Dante Aligheri , Giovanni Boccaccio and Petrarch 's works in
9638-506: The first half of the 20th century coincided with a questioning of the purpose and meaning of traditional definitions of poetry and of distinctions between poetry and prose, particularly given examples of poetic prose and prosaic poetry. Numerous modernist poets have written in non-traditional forms or in what traditionally would have been considered prose, although their writing was generally infused with poetic diction and often with rhythm and tone established by non-metrical means. While there
9760-501: The first, second and fourth lines of a quatrain rhyme with each other and the third line do not rhyme, the quatrain is said to have an AA BA rhyme scheme . This rhyme scheme is the one used, for example, in the rubaiyat form. Similarly, an A BB A quatrain (what is known as " enclosed rhyme ") is used in such forms as the Petrarchan sonnet . Some types of more complicated rhyming schemes have developed names of their own, separate from
9882-457: The format of more objectively-informative, academic, or typical writing, which is known as prose . Poetry uses forms and conventions to suggest differential interpretations of words, or to evoke emotive responses. The use of ambiguity , symbolism , irony , and other stylistic elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations. Similarly, figures of speech such as metaphor , simile , and metonymy establish
10004-444: The greatest poet of Polish language, wrote a Latin ode for emperor Napoleon III . Another example is Jerzy Pietrkiewicz , a Polish poet. When he moved to Great Britain, he ceased to write poetry in Polish, but started writing a novel in English. He also translated poetry into English. Many universities offer degrees in creative writing though these only came into existence in the 20th century. While these courses are not necessary for
10126-414: The iamb and dactyl to describe common combinations of long and short sounds. Each of these types of feet has a certain "feel," whether alone or in combination with other feet. The iamb, for example, is the most natural form of rhythm in the English language, and generally produces a subtle but stable verse. Scanning meter can often show the basic or fundamental pattern underlying a verse, but does not show
10248-418: The language. Actual rhythm is significantly more complex than the basic scanned meter described above, and many scholars have sought to develop systems that would scan such complexity. Vladimir Nabokov noted that overlaid on top of the regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of verse was a separate pattern of accents resulting from the natural pitch of the spoken words, and suggested that
10370-403: The line, the stanza or verse paragraph , and larger combinations of stanzas or lines such as cantos . Also sometimes used are broader visual presentations of words and calligraphy . These basic units of poetic form are often combined into larger structures, called poetic forms or poetic modes (see the following section), as in the sonnet . Poetry is often separated into lines on a page, in
10492-523: The major American verse of the twenty-first century, may yet be seen as what Stevens called 'a great shadow's last embellishment,' the shadow being Emerson's." In the 2020s, advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models , enabled the generation of poetry in specific styles and formats. A 2024 study found that AI-generated poems were rated by non-expert readers as more rhythmic, beautiful, and human-like than those written by well-known human authors. This preference may stem from
10614-537: The modern era, the term bilad al-Yaman came to refer specifically to the southwestern parts of the peninsula. Arab geographers started to refer to the whole peninsula as 'jazirat al-Arab', or the peninsula of the Arabs. The railway was started in 1900 at the behest of the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II and was built largely by the Turks , with German advice and support. A public subscription
10736-491: The modern state of Saudi Arabia. The Saudis absorbed the Emirate of Asir , with their expansion only ending in 1934 after a war with Yemen . Two Saudi states were formed and controlled much of Arabia before Ibn Saud was even born. Ibn Saud, however, established the third Saudi state. The second major development has been the discovery of vast reserves of oil in the 1930s. Its production brought great wealth to all countries of
10858-472: The mountains of the UAE and northern Oman. The peninsula consists of: Arabia has few lakes or permanent rivers. Most areas are drained by ephemeral watercourses called wadis , which are dry except during the rainy season. Plentiful ancient aquifers exist beneath much of the peninsula, however, and where this water surfaces, oases form (e.g. Al-Hasa and Qatif , two of the world's largest oases ) and permit agriculture, especially palm trees , which allowed
10980-507: The much older oral poetry, as in their long, rhyming qasidas . Some rhyming schemes have become associated with a specific language, culture or period, while other rhyming schemes have achieved use across languages, cultures or time periods. Some forms of poetry carry a consistent and well-defined rhyming scheme, such as the chant royal or the rubaiyat , while other poetic forms have variable rhyme schemes. Most rhyme schemes are described using letters that correspond to sets of rhymes, so if
11102-436: The native population. The four smallest states (by area), with coastlines entirely bordering the Persian Gulf, showcase the world's most extreme population growth, nearly tripling every two decades. In 2014, the estimated population of the Arabian Peninsula was 77,983,936 (including expatriates). The Arabian Peninsula is known for having one of the most uneven adult sex ratios in the world, with females in some regions (especially
11224-510: The original Urheimat of the Semitic languages by most scholars. The seventh century saw the rise of Islam as the peninsula's dominant religion. The Islamic prophet Muhammad was born in Mecca in about 570 and first began preaching in the city in 610, but migrated to Medina in 622. From there he and his companions united the tribes of Arabia under the banner of Islam and created
11346-399: The peninsula to produce more dates than any other region in the world. In general, the climate is extremely hot and arid , although there are exceptions. Higher elevations are made temperate by their altitude, and the Arabian Sea coastline can receive cool, humid breezes in summer due to cold upwelling offshore. The peninsula has no thick forests. Desert-adapted wildlife is present throughout
11468-564: The phrase "the anxiety of demand" to describe the contemporary response to older poetic traditions as "being fearful that the fact no longer has a form", building on a trope introduced by Emerson. Emerson had maintained that in the debate concerning poetic structure where either "form" or "fact" could predominate, that one need simply "Ask the fact for the form." This has been challenged at various levels by other literary scholars such as Harold Bloom (1930–2019), who has stated: "The generation of poets who stand together now, mature and ready to write
11590-456: The poem; therefore, Sinuhe is conjectured to be a real person. In Ancient Rome , professional poets were generally sponsored by patrons , including nobility and military officials. For instance, Gaius Cilnius Maecenas , friend to Caesar Augustus , was an important patron for the Augustan poets, including both Horace and Virgil . Ovid , a well established poet, was banished from Rome by
11712-443: The poet as simply one who creates using language, and poetry as what the poet creates. The underlying concept of the poet as creator is not uncommon, and some modernist poets essentially do not distinguish between the creation of a poem with words, and creative acts in other media. Other modernists challenge the very attempt to define poetry as misguided. The rejection of traditional forms and structures for poetry that began in
11834-461: The production of poetry with inspiration – often by a Muse (either classical or contemporary), or through other (often canonised) poets' work which sets some kind of example or challenge. In first-person poems, the lyrics are spoken by an "I", a character who may be termed the speaker , distinct from the poet (the author ). Thus if, for example, a poem asserts, "I killed my enemy in Reno", it
11956-636: The region, with the exception of Yemen. The North Yemen Civil War was fought in North Yemen between royalists of the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen and factions of the Yemen Arab Republic from 1962 to 1970. The war began with a coup d'état carried out by the republican leader, Abdullah as-Sallal , which dethroned the newly crowned Muhammad al-Badr and declared Yemen a republic under his presidency. The Imam escaped to
12078-419: The region. A plateau more than 2,500 feet (760 m) high extends across much of the Arabian Peninsula. The plateau slopes eastwards from the massive, rifted escarpment along the coast of the Red Sea, to the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf. The interior is characterized by cuestas and valleys, drained by a system of wadis . A crescent of sand and gravel deserts lies to the east. There are mountains at
12200-613: The regional relationships. Arabs living in one of the existing districts of the Arabian peninsula, the Emirate of Hejaz , asked for a British guarantee of independence. Their proposal included all Arab lands south of a line roughly corresponding to the northern frontiers of present-day Syria and Iraq. They envisioned a new Arab state, or confederation of states, adjoining the southern Arabian Peninsula. It would have comprised Cilicia – İskenderun and Mersin , Iraq with Kuwait, Syria, Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate , Jordan, and Palestine . In
12322-463: The relative simplicity and accessibility of AI-generated poetry, which some participants found easier to understand. Prosody is the study of the meter, rhythm , and intonation of a poem. Rhythm and meter are different, although closely related. Meter is the definitive pattern established for a verse (such as iambic pentameter ), while rhythm is the actual sound that results from a line of poetry. Prosody also may be used more specifically to refer to
12444-420: The rhyming scheme or other structural elements of one stanza determine those of succeeding stanzas. Examples of such interlocking stanzas include, for example, the ghazal and the villanelle , where a refrain (or, in the case of the villanelle, refrains) is established in the first stanza which then repeats in subsequent stanzas. Related to the use of interlocking stanzas is their use to separate thematic parts of
12566-786: The ruling Ottoman Empire and creating a single unified Arab state spanning from Aleppo in Syria to Aden in Yemen. During World War I, the Sharif Hussein entered into an alliance with the United Kingdom and France against the Ottomans in June 1916. These events were followed by the foundation of Saudi Arabia under King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud . In 1902, Ibn Saud had captured Riyadh . Continuing his conquests, Abdulaziz subdued Al-Hasa, Jabal Shammar , Hejaz between 1913 and 1926 founded
12688-564: The term "artistic kenosis" is sometimes used to describe the hymnographer's success in "emptying out" the instinct to succeed as a poet. A singer in the pew might have several of Watts's stanzas memorized, without ever knowing his name or thinking of him as a poet. Poetry Poetry (from the Greek word poiesis , "making") is a form of literary art that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, literal or surface-level meanings. Any particular instance of poetry
12810-534: The term "scud" be used to distinguish an unaccented stress from an accented stress. Different traditions and genres of poetry tend to use different meters, ranging from the Shakespearean iambic pentameter and the Homeric dactylic hexameter to the anapestic tetrameter used in many nursery rhymes. However, a number of variations to the established meter are common, both to provide emphasis or attention to
12932-629: The term Arabistan in a broad sense for the region starting from Cilicia , where the Euphrates river makes its descent into Syria, through Palestine , and on through the remainder of the Sinai and Arabian peninsulas. The provinces of Arabia were: Al Tih, the Sinai peninsula, Hejaz, Asir, Yemen, Hadramaut, Mahra and Shilu, Oman, Hasa, Bahrain, Dahna, Nufud, the Hammad, which included the deserts of Syria, Mesopotamia and Babylonia. The Arabian Peninsula
13054-549: The thirty seven largest aquifers "have exceeded sustainability tipping points and are being depleted" and thirteen of them are "considered significantly distressed". Stone tools from the Middle Paleolithic age along with fossils of other animals discovered at Ti's al Ghadah, in northwestern Saudi Arabia, might imply that hominins migrated through a "Green Arabia" between 300,000 and 500,000 years ago. 200,000-year-old stone tools were discovered at Shuaib Al-Adgham in
13176-421: The use of similar vowel sounds within a word rather than similar sounds at the beginning or end of a word, was widely used in skaldic poetry but goes back to the Homeric epic. Because verbs carry much of the pitch in the English language, assonance can loosely evoke the tonal elements of Chinese poetry and so is useful in translating Chinese poetry. Consonance occurs where a consonant sound is repeated throughout
13298-437: The varying degrees of stress , as well as the differing pitches and lengths of syllables. There is debate over how useful a multiplicity of different "feet" is in describing meter. For example, Robert Pinsky has argued that while dactyls are important in classical verse, English dactylic verse uses dactyls very irregularly and can be better described based on patterns of iambs and anapests, feet which he considers natural to
13420-511: The war in Yemen as analogous to the United States ' role in the Vietnam War . In 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. The invasion of Kuwait by Iraqi forces led to the 1990–91 Gulf War . Egypt, Qatar, Syria, and Saudi Arabia joined a multinational coalition that opposed Iraq. Displays of support for Iraq by Jordan and Palestine resulted in strained relations between many of the Arab states. After
13542-484: The war sank into a stalemate. Egypt's commitment to the war is considered to have been detrimental to its performance in the Six-Day War of June 1967, after which Nasser found it increasingly difficult to maintain his army's involvement and began to pull his forces out of Yemen. By 1970, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia recognized the republic and a truce was signed. Egyptian military historians refer to Egypt's role in
13664-643: The war, a so-called "Damascus Declaration" formalized an alliance for future joint Arab defensive actions between Egypt, Syria, and the GCC member states. The Arab Spring reached Yemen in January 2011. People of Yemen took to the street demonstrating against three decades of rule by President Ali Abdullah Saleh . The demonstration led to cracks in the ruling General People's Congress (GPC) and Saleh's Sanhani clan. Saleh used tactics of concession and violence to save his presidency. After numerous attempts, Saleh accepted
13786-517: The world's largest reserves of oil. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are economically the wealthiest in the region. Qatar, the only peninsular country in the Persian Gulf on the larger peninsula, is home to the Arabic-language television station Al Jazeera and its English-language subsidiary Al Jazeera English . Kuwait, on the border with Iraq, is an important country strategically, forming one of the main staging grounds for coalition forces mounting
13908-578: The world's largest, undestroyed and most pristine coral reefs. In addition, the organisms living in symbiosis with the Red Sea coral, the protozoa and zooxanthellae , have a unique hot weather adaptation to sudden rise (and fall) in sea water temperature. Hence, these coral reefs are not affected by coral bleaching caused by rise in temperature as elsewhere in the indopacific coral sea. The reefs are also unaffected by mass tourism and diving or other large scale human interference. The Persian gulf has suffered significant loss and degradation of coral reefs with
14030-1032: The world's oldest love poem. An example of Egyptian epic poetry is The Story of Sinuhe (c. 1800 BCE). Other ancient epics includes the Greek Iliad and the Odyssey ; the Persian Avestan books (the Yasna ); the Roman national epic , Virgil 's Aeneid (written between 29 and 19 BCE); and the Indian epics , the Ramayana and the Mahabharata . Epic poetry appears to have been composed in poetic form as an aid to memorization and oral transmission in ancient societies. Other forms of poetry, including such ancient collections of religious hymns as
14152-575: Was a popular narrative poem from the Middle Kingdom of Egypt , written c. 1750 BC, about an ancient Egyptian man named Sinuhe , who flees his country and lives in a foreign land until his return, shortly before his death. The Story of Sinuhe was one of several popular narrative poems in Ancient Egyptian . Scholars have conjectured that Story of Sinuhe was actually written by an Ancient Egyptian man named Sinuhe, describing his life in
14274-402: Was a substantial formalist reaction within the modernist schools to the breakdown of structure, this reaction focused as much on the development of new formal structures and syntheses as on the revival of older forms and structures. Postmodernism goes beyond modernism's emphasis on the creative role of the poet, to emphasize the role of the reader of a text ( hermeneutics ), and to highlight
14396-581: Was headquartered in Syria , which included Palestine, the Transjordan region in addition to Lebanon ( Mount Lebanon was, however, a semi-autonomous mutasarrifate ). It was put in charge of Syria, Cilicia, Iraq, and the remainder of the Arabian Peninsula. The Ottomans never had any control over central Arabia, also known as the Najd region. The emergence of what was to become the Saudi royal family, known as
14518-677: Was influential throughout the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age , as well as in Europe during the Renaissance . Later poets and aestheticians often distinguished poetry from, and defined it in opposition to prose , which they generally understood as writing with a proclivity to logical explication and a linear narrative structure. This does not imply that poetry is illogical or lacks narration, but rather that poetry
14640-675: Was opened throughout the Islamic world to fund the construction. The railway was to be a waqf , an inalienable religious endowment or charitable trust. The major developments of the early 20th century were the Arab Revolt during World War I and the subsequent collapse and partitioning of the Ottoman Empire . The Arab Revolt (1916–1918) was initiated by the Sherif Hussein ibn Ali with the aim of securing independence from
14762-455: Was to avenge a recent defeat by Byzantine (or Eastern Roman Empire ) forces, although he first had to put down a rebellion by Arab tribes in an episode known as the Ridda wars , or "Wars of Apostasy". On his death in 634, he was succeeded by Umar as caliph, followed by Uthman ibn al-Affan and Ali ibn Abi Talib . The period of these first four caliphs is known as al-khulafā' ar-rāshidūn :
14884-416: Was used by poets such as Pindar and Sappho , and by the great tragedians of Athens . Similarly, " dactylic hexameter ", comprises six feet per line, of which the dominant kind of foot is the " dactyl ". Dactylic hexameter was the traditional meter of Greek epic poetry , the earliest extant examples of which are the works of Homer and Hesiod . Iambic pentameter and dactylic hexameter were later used by
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