I am stupid pls educate me. Were they actually poems?
A poem is anything written in verse, with clearly structured lines and usually carefully selected words that distinguish it from prose or conversational language.
You can have a poem without rhyming but you can’t have a poem without rhythm. In fact, most people’s idea of a poem as something that rhymes is just a really good way to sound corny and dumb.
Freestyle poetry still has lines of a certain length, and if there’s no consistency in it, it doesn’t sound good.
The don’t rhyme very much, but maybe they did in their original languages.
They often did rhyme in their original languages, yeah though your mileage may vary on the cultural standard for what constitutes rhyming. Sometimes words only rhyme in certain dialects. Sometimes these poems didn’t rhyme, but instead exhibited similar features like consonance (same consonant sounds) or assonance (same vowel sounds) or alliteration (same starting sounds). You could be sure that there were certainly some kind of aesthetic choices going on with the words, even if it wasn’t end-of-line rhyming.
Also the rhymes aren’t always end-line rhymes, but can sometimes be found at the beginnings and middles of lines.
They do have rhythm, though.
Yes, they maintain (mostly) consistent meters throughout. Iliad was dactylic hexameter in the original Greek, I’ve been told.
That would be so exhausting to read lmao. Imagine if Das Capital was an insanely long poem.
Imagine if Das Capital was an insanely long poem.
There once was a coat from Berlin,
twas worth ten yards of linen.
From whence was its worth?
It didn’t come from the cloth,
It came from hard work and spinnin.
Yes, both are very clearly poems with set rhythms and rhymes. They’re epic poems, very long, but at their core still works of poetry rather than prose.
Beowulf and Paradise Lost actually don’t rhyme too much, instead favoring alliterative verse and blank verse respectively. I think part of the issue is that people generally learn strict conceptions of poetry due to how it’s reproduced in schools and children’s media. Basically “poetry=rhymes, everything else is prose”, so when works outside that understanding (especially older ones) come up there’s a bit of a disconnect
I think the thing was back then they weren’t writing stuff down so they’d give stories a bit of a rhythm, rhyme or just general poetic quality to make it easier to recite and remember but idk I ain’t no nerd
Beowulf (like a lot of epics) was originally an oral tradition and thus was originally recited as verse because it’s easier to memorise that way.
When it was finally written down, it retained the verse structure, which is all you really need to classify a written work as a poem.
Idk about Paradise Lost, never read it.
