Poetry is created from several different key "ingredients" which feed the mind food for thought. Historically poetry has evolved over time to include such aspects as rhythm, rhyme, the senses, emotions and intellect. The universal language of poetry is a bridge that transcends all languages. You need not understand the language of poetry to understand the inspired emotion and feeling behind it only tune in your natural instincts to the other aspects of the poetry and the door to a new world will be opened before your senses.
Poetry has enriched every culture with its flowing rhymes and picturesque word phrases since the birth of language. It has been used in multiple ways for our human race. One such way was the passing on of legend and myths as Warren states in the following passage,.
"In preliterate cultures, the myths and history of the tribe, the magical incantations, and the religious rituals went into verbal forms which facilitated transmission for generation to generation. In this aspect the form had a practical efficacy in preserving and transmitting information, but the form also, we must remember, combined the urgencies of the material being transmitted with the urgencies of rhythm- (3).
I might conclude from the passage, however, that poetry is a natural form of language having been used in preliterate times in any form and because it helped create a way for people to remember stories even if they were frequently " the teasing possibilities of sense really come to nothing."(2). Of course in this way, poetry was used as a utility to pass on information and not like entertainment, as it was used in later centuries, especially in the time of Shakespeare.
Rhythm is key to the structural make-up of poetry and "a principle of all life and activity and is, of course, deeply involved in the experience of, and the expression of emotion."(2). Rhythm surrounds us in life for, "The human body itself is a locus of rhythms: the beat of the heart, the inhalation and exhalation of breath, waking and sleeping, effort and rest-(2.