诗（广义），一般认为是一种内容与形式高度结合统一，并体现出“美感”、适宜吟咏的文学形式。诗能够自成一格，也能与其他艺术相结合，如诗剧、歌词或散文诗，文本配上音乐则称为歌。「诗」根源于简洁、有力地想像觉察，或与经验、想法、情绪反应作联想，将意义、意识和潜意识的表现、象征化、正式或非正式的式样、声音和韵律等以某种规则加以重组安排。这种文学类型包含叙述性、戏剧性、讽刺性、训诫式、情色和个人形式。

诗是一门历史悠久的艺术。早期企图界定诗歌的有亚里斯多德的《诗学》，主要聚焦于修辞以及戏剧、歌曲与喜剧中措辞的运用。后来人们认为诗的特点在于可以吟诵，以及如字句段落的格式与韵律的要求，并强调诗的美感，称为韵文，以此与散文相区别。至二十世纪中期，诗的定义转为宽松，即以语言作的基本创作。

Poetry is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language—such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre—to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning.

Poetry has a long history, dating back to the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Early poems evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing, or from a need to retell oral epics, as with the Sanskrit Vedas, Zoroastrian Gathas, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Ancient attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle's Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song and comedy. Later attempts concentrated on features such as repetition, verse form and rhyme, and emphasized the aesthetics which distinguish poetry from more objectively informative, prosaic forms of writing. From the mid-20th century, poetry has sometimes been more generally regarded as a fundamental creative act employing language.