Poem

A literary composition or versification with regular qualitative and quantitative features such as rhyme, alliteration, sustained metaphor, feet, stress, rhythm, inflection, etc. A poem may be a rhymed couplet of two line, or even a single line as some haiku, or it may extend to several thousand lines and tens of thousands of words. Some forms are recognizabed only to those standing in special traditions, for example, the juxtaposition poetically, according to their shape and structure, as well as vocalization, of selected Chinese characters or of calligraphically developed alphabet elements in some scripts such as Arabic, particularly where characters or alphabet have ideographic or symbolic values. Therefore a poetry of words may be augmented by a poetry of writing or graphics, just as an orally delivered from of poetic presentation may be augmented by a poetry of gesture.