Editing Metre (poetry) (section)

==History==
{{Further|History of poetry}}
Metrical texts are first attested in early [[Indo-European languages]]. The earliest known unambiguously metrical texts, and at the same time the only metrical texts with a claim of dating to the [[Late Bronze Age]],  are the hymns of the [[Rigveda]]. That the texts of the [[Ancient Near East]] (Sumerian, Egyptian or Semitic) should not exhibit metre is surprising, and may be partly due to the nature of [[Bronze Age writing]].{{citation needed|date=January 2016}} There were, in fact, attempts to reconstruct metrical qualities of the poetic portions of the [[Hebrew Bible]], e.g. by [[Gustav Bickell]]<ref>"Metrices biblicae regulae exemplis illustratae", 1879, "Carmina Vet. Test. metrice", 1882</ref> or [[Julius Ley]],<ref>"Leitfaden der Metrik der hebräischen Poesie", 1887</ref> but they remained inconclusive<ref>The [[Catholic Encyclopedia]] s.v. ''Hebrew Poetry of the Old Testament'' calls them 'Procrustean'.</ref> (see [[Biblical poetry]]). [[Early Iron Age]] metrical poetry is found in the Iranian [[Avesta]] and in the Greek works attributed to [[Homer]] and [[Hesiod]].
[[Latin poetry|Latin verse]] survives from the [[Old Latin]] period ({{Circa|2nd century BC}}), in the [[Saturnian (poetry)|Saturnian metre]]. [[Persian poetry]]<ref>[[Fereydoon Motamed]] ''[[:File:La Metrique Diatemporelle Full Text.pdf|La Metrique Diatemporelle]]'': Quantitative poetic metric analysis and pursuit of reasoning on aesthetics of linguistics and poetry in Indo-European languages.</ref> arises in the [[Sassanid]] era. [[Tamil language|Tamil]] poetry of the early centuries AD may be the earliest known non-Indo-European

[[Medieval poetry]] was metrical without exception, spanning traditions as diverse as European [[Minnesang]], [[Trouvère]] or [[Bardic poetry]], Classical [[Persian poetry|Persian]] and [[Sanskrit poetry]], [[Tang dynasty]] [[Chinese poetry]] or the [[Japanese poetry|Japanese]] [[Nara period]] ''[[Man'yōshū]]''. Renaissance and Early Modern poetry in Europe is characterized by a return to templates of Classical Antiquity, a tradition begun by [[Petrarch|Petrarca]]'s generation and continued into the time of [[Shakespeare]] and [[John Milton|Milton]].