10 Fascinating and Unexpected Uses of Poetry from History

Expressing love, honoring the dead, and protesting injustice are just some of the things poetry is commonly used for in the world today. But this ancient art form and human cultural universal has played many roles throughout history, some of which are sure to seem strange to modern folk who live in times when poetry is less prominent than it has been in the past. Read on to find out more about ten of poetry’s most unusual and unexpected purposes.

Related: Ten Strange Books & the Strange Ways They Were Written

10 Celebrating Athletic Victories

An ode is a type of poem that heaps praise upon its subject, often in a highly descriptive and lyrical way. That subject can be a person, idea, or event, but emotions have long been a popular choice. One example is Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” which would famously be set to music by Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony. The composer was continuing an old tradition, as the original ancient Greek odes were accompanied by music.

However, to find something closer to the original odes today, people might want to check out the stadium of their local sports team rather than a concert hall. That is because the ancient Greeks used odes to celebrate athletic victories. Their odes often adhered to strict forms and were filled with rich imagery, but the chants coming from the fans of a modern sports team may not be too wide of the mark.^[1]

9 Celebrating Drinking and Partying

When the lyrics are not about love or a lack thereof, modern pop music is often themed around partying and drinking. But back in the Middle Ages, poetry was written about these things, with much of it coming from an unlikely source. Surprisingly, it was Arabic poets who led the way in these types of poems. Many came from Muslim Spain, where wine was a popular subject in muwashshaḥ, a kind of Arabic ode.

This seems surprising because Arabic culture is often mixed up with the Islamic religion today, which forbids drinking. However, this ban was not the consensus until around the 10th century. Before that, poets like Abu Nuwas were mostly free to write about their love of strong wine and good times. His khamriyyat, or “wine songs,” outlined his hedonistic habits in rich detail and made him one of the most celebrated but controversial Arabic poets.^[2]

8 Honoring Military Promotions (and Haircuts)

Many people have heard that the epic poems of ancient Greece, like The Iliad and The Odyssey, were likely shared through oral performances before they were eventually written down. After that, the art of performing them died out. However, it still exists in other parts of the world, such as Mongolia. There, lengthy epic poems called Tuuli are passed down through generations and are still performed today by specially trained singers. However, there are few of them left.

Tuuli can be thousands of lines long and often tells tales of heroes from myths and history. They have been used for centuries to help pass historical and cultural knowledge down to young Mongolians, often performed at celebrations such as weddings, state affairs, and the child’s first haircut. Back in the times of the Mongol Empire, new epic poems were composed for events like appointing the chief of a mingan, a large unit of Mongol warriors.^[3]

7 Rousing Soldiers for Battle

To ancient Greek warriors such as the Hoplites, poetry had a more practical purpose than just honoring the appointment of a new chief. It helped ready them for battle. This was important because the Hoplites were not full-time soldiers, but citizens who had been called up to defend against invaders. They were highly skilled, but there were probably other things they would rather have been doing. That is why a type of poem called a paean came in handy.

The paean was a hymn that the men would chant together in order to appeal to the gods to protect them. Over time, the term “paean” would come to describe songs and poems that expressed joy or praise more generally, but on the battlefield, it helped armies prepare for action. It did not just do this in a spiritual way, as the chanting also helped the men fall into step so they could maintain their formation.^[4]

6 Describing Other Works of Art

The name of this next type of poetry also comes from ancient Greece, and some of the earliest examples of it can actually be found in epic poems like The Iliad. It is called ekphrasis, which simply means “description.” However, this type of poetry aims to describe something in such rich detail that the person reading it can see it clearly in their mind, as if it were in front of them.

The thing being described could be anything, but describing works of art using this type of poem would become especially popular in the late 18th century. This was a time when the public wanted to see great art, but there was no simple way to copy and share it. Instead, art lovers had to rely on the linguistic talents of poets to deliver a similar visual experience. Many famous poets have written ekphrasis, including Keats, Shelley, and W. H. Auden.^[5]

5 Defying Bans on Religious Imagery

Other types of poetry do not just use words to recreate images, but to actually create them. That is to say, the words are laid out in a specific shape on the page, giving the poem a visual dimension for readers to ponder and enjoy. Today, this type of poetry is known as “concrete” or “shaped” poetry, but it has existed for centuries. Some early examples come from the 17th-century religious poems of an Englishman called George Herbert.

The shape of Herbert’s poems made printing them a challenge in his day, as large parts of the printing process still had to be done by hand. However, Herbert did not arrange his poems this way just to make them look nice. He was writing in the wake of the English Reformation, which had seen the Church of England ban and attempt to destroy religious imagery. His shaped poems subtly sent the message that art had endured.^[6]

4 Balancing Out Bad Deeds

Poetry is often thought of as soft and emotional, yet it has consistently found favor among history’s worst people. The list of tyrants who enjoyed writing it is long. It includes Nero, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao Zedong, and Saddam Hussein. Even Osama bin Laden tried his hand at it during his years in hiding, becoming one of the most celebrated jihadi poets. This raises the question of what it is about poetry that attracts minds like these.

The poetry of most of the people named above precedes their bad deeds, so one theory is that they channeled their artistic frustration into their politics. Another theory is that they wanted to show that they had qualities other than being a dictator. Some also probably felt expected to write. In China, Japan, and many Arab countries, it was traditional for rulers and warriors to write poems. Predictably, some also used their poems as part of their propaganda.^[7]

3 Recording History and PR Management

Vikings are often depicted as bloodthirsty bands of raiders, but in reality, only a small number of them were like that. Many more Viking men would have worked on farms than gone on raids. However, Scandinavian society in the Middle Ages was also home to an even smaller, more elite band of professionals. These were the skalds, and they were carefully trained court poets who entertained Viking leaders.

There were thought to be as few as 300 skalds, and their training could take years. Their job was to not only memorize a huge number of current and historical events, but to turn them into poetry that adhered to complex rules. The characters in the poems were often the living patrons of the skalds, so they had to be portrayed in a good light. This made the skalds not only historians but also predecessors of political spin doctors.^[8]

2 Preserving Cowboy Culture

People from many different walks of life made their way to the American West in the mid-to-late 19th century. There were former slaves, veterans from the Civil War, Native Americans, and Mexican cattle herders. Most had lived tough lives, and many turned to poetry to share their experiences with others. That is how the rich tradition of cowboy poetry began, and it is one that still survives in certain corners of the US today.

By the turn of the 20th century, the traditional cowboy way of life was giving way to modernization. Adherents like the rancher Jack Thorpe thought that it would not survive much longer. To preserve this unique culture, Thorpe compiled two anthologies of cowboy poems he had heard throughout his life. Some of these would go on to become standards of the genre and would still be performed in the 21st century, along with new cowboy poems they helped inspire.^[9]

1 Demonstrating Mathematical Sequences

All throughout history, people have found new contexts to use poetry as a tool, which has not stopped in recent years. One modern example comes from the math professor JoAnne Growney, who used poetry to help her students feel more connected to what they were learning. Lines and syllables follow numerical rules in many types of poetry, so poems are a natural place to demonstrate mathematical concepts.

The Fibonacci sequence is one concept that can easily be used to create a clear but challenging structure for a poem. The first two lines have just one word, and the number of words in each line onward is the sum of the two lines before it. In 1960s France, the OULIPO movement experimented with many math-inspired forms of poetry like this. They invented the “snowball” exercise, where each subsequent word in a line grows by one letter.^[10]