things change

One of the things that surprised me when I started to learn more about the subject of English, is how important poetry is. From everything I learned in High School, poetry seemed like a branch of English, but when I studied it at a higher level, I discovered that poetry was more like the whole tree...at least for most of recorded history it was. The novel - which is what I thought was the pre-eminent literary form - was a very recent development. The novel as we know it, in its modern form, has only been around for a couple of hundred years.