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Within the last forty to fifty years poetry has gone off the path it was meant to take. Believe it or not people actually used to recite poetry out of love for the written word and the beauty and rhythm of those words. But not anymore. And in trying to understand this I realized that most people do not know it's real history.

I am not talking now about those great poets of an even older time such as Homer, Hesiod,etc. but of the common mans poetry.

Imagine a world where there is no radio, no telephone, no tv, no movies, no newspapers and NO BOOKS! Because that was our early world. People had no access to information except by word of mouth. Travelers moving through an area passed on news by word of mouth. Town cryers yelled out messages from the rulers, and 'Gossips' spread the word as best they could. But when people passed on this news they did not always get it right as is usual with people, and the stories became garbled. That's where the Troubadors came in. They moved from town to town with their songs and news and gossip. Telling people what was exciting or awful or important.

But in order for them to remember the news they had to impart, they needed a trick. That trick was to make the words impossible to get wrong or lost. That was the ability to make the words rhyme. To create a rhythm of sound and ryme that people could not forget. In that way every troubador could pass on hundreds of stories and other's could pick it up and pass it still further. Thus the popular songs and poetry came into being.

In time it became a method of telling a story. And that is when the dramatic poets came into being. The words had a music and a rhythm to them that could be your ticket to a good dinner or two if you could remember them and recite your work.

In times of great ordeals, many men have told of keeping their sanity by reciting poetry they loved. When men were in prisons during the war, the only thing that kept some of them sane was poetry. What would this generation of men recite in thier minds? Not todays poetry that's for sure. It has no rhythm, no meter, no rhyme. It is no longer poetry but it is more on the lines of paragraph's out of context. It takes effort to find a rhythm and rhyme but it is worth it. Even songs today don't make it unless the words have a rhyming rhythm to them.

Like the art of forty years ago, where a picture of a yellow streak was considered a work of art, because the so called art critics made that claim, and the Canadian Art Gallery that paid 3 million dollars for this crap. People don't realize that sometimes the experts are not Experts, and so they are afraid to argue with their own kind. These con artists don't just exist in the financial world, they exist in the field of arts as well. If you want to buy a picture that an artist made by throwing paint on the canvas, fine, but don't call it art! And don't pay a lot for it. A good price is; the cost of the canvas, and the paint and the artist time. (about ten minutes?).