the Greeks (for example, the Iliad and the Odyssey), through Shakespearean sonnets of the Renaissance period, right up to modern songs heard on radio and TV. The Orient and the Middle East have an even longer history of written poetic works. But poetry has also existed and still exists in nonliterate societies around the world—in Australia, Micronesia, Africa, and South America. Though they may not have been preserved in writing, songs and poems from these cultures have been passed in oral form from