Poetry

Poetry, in the broad sense of "verbal art", has been reported for all or nearly all well-studied societies. Poetry in the narrower sense of special forms of speech, characterized by lines demarcated by pauses and the repetition of some structural, semantic, or auditory elements but also free variation, is similarly widespread. There are no exceptions among literate peoples. Poetry gives rise to a variety of elements and modalities, such as metaphor and rhyme, and to a great variety of genres from one people to another. Individuals vary in their mastery of poetic speech, and very often area judged by their verbal skills. Poetic speech may date to the Late Pleistocene. Insofar poetic speech is fundamentally linguistic, it has no close counterparts among nonhuman primates. However, as acoustically attractive vocalization, it has counterparts among a great many species and may share the signaling functions of vocalizations in those species.