In Greece, poems of feeling were sung to the lyre, and the name stuck. A lyric poem is a short poem expressing the thoughts or feelings of a single speaker. Epic tells a people's story; lyric captures a moment inside one person. Nearly every literate culture, and every oral one, has made lyric poetry, and the forms they invented show different ideas of what a poem should do.

The tools of a poem

Poems work with sound and shape as much as meaning. Meter is the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, or of syllable counts, in a line. English verse usually counts stresses; Japanese and French verse count syllables or sound units. Rhyme links lines by their final sounds. The line break is a tool prose lacks: a poet can stop a line where the reader will pause and feel a word's weight. Images, concrete things that can be seen, heard or touched, do much of a poem's work, because they let a reader feel an emotion rather than be told about it.

Ancient voices: Sappho and the Classic of Poetry

Sappho lived on the Greek island of Lesbos around 600 BCE, and ancient writers ranked her among the greatest of poets. Her poems were collected into nine books, but almost all were lost. From Sappho, only one complete poem survives, plus many fragments, some recovered from scraps of papyrus used to wrap mummies or thrown on rubbish heaps in Egypt. Even in pieces, her poems of desire and jealousy, spoken by a woman, remain startlingly direct.

In China, the Shijing, or Classic of Poetry, gathers 305 poems from roughly the eleventh to the seventh centuries BCE: folk songs, court hymns and complaints about war and hard labor. Tradition says Confucius edited it. Chinese poetry reached a high point under the Tang dynasty (618 to 907) with Li Bai and Du Fu. Du Fu wrote of the suffering of soldiers and refugees during the An Lushan rebellion of 755. Parallelism, matching lines in grammar and meaning, is a key device of classical Chinese poetry: a line about mountains is answered by a line about rivers, word for word.

The ghazal and the haiku

In Persian, Arabic, Urdu and Turkish, one of the most loved forms is the ghazal. A ghazal is a poem of couplets, each complete in itself, linked by a repeated rhyme and refrain. Its subjects are longing, wine and love, which can be read as earthly, divine or both at once. Hafez of Shiraz, in the fourteenth century, is its great master; Iranian families still open his collected poems at random to seek advice, and Goethe wrote a whole book of poems in answer to him in 1819. Rumi, a century earlier, wrote ghazals of ecstatic religious love.

In Japan, the short verse that became known as haiku flowered with Matsuo Basho (1644 to 1694). A haiku traditionally has seventeen sound units in a 5, 7, 5 pattern. A haiku traditionally includes a seasonal reference, called a kigo, which places the moment in the turning year, and often a cutting word that splits the poem into two parts that spark against each other.

Sonnets and free verse

In Italy, Petrarch (1304 to 1374) perfected the sonnet, which spread across Europe. A sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines with a set rhyme scheme, often built around a turn from problem to answer. Shakespeare published 154 of them in 1609.

In the United States, two nineteenth century poets broke the rules from opposite sides. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855) used long, rolling lines in free verse: poetry without a regular meter or rhyme scheme. In its final edition it opens: "I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." The self he celebrates is everyone's, an idea close to democratic equality. Emily Dickinson (1830 to 1886) wrote nearly 1,800 compact, strange poems, of which only about ten were published in her lifetime. "'Hope' is the thing with feathers," one begins, "That perches in the soul."

Worked example: an old pond

Basho's most famous haiku, from 1686, can be given in a plain word by word version: "old pond / a frog jumps in / sound of water." Read closely. The first line is still and timeless, the second sudden, the third an echo that fades into the stillness again. The cutting word in the Japanese comes after "old pond", splitting age from instant. The kigo is the frog, a spring image in Japanese tradition. There is no stated emotion, yet the poem makes a reader feel how a single small event can open up a vast quiet.

Now set it beside the end of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." Both poems are about time. Shakespeare's argues, with rhyme and logic, that the poem will defeat death and keep the beloved alive. Basho's makes no argument at all; it lets the moment vanish. One form claims permanence, the other honors passing, and reading them together shows how much a form carries its culture's sense of what is worth saying.