Gnomic verse

Gnomic verse may sound silly, but the essence of this type of poetry is to provide serious, meaningful advice.

Before gnome referred to a little, dwarfish man who lives underground and guards treasure, a gnome was an aphorism, or pithy expression of a general truth. The two forms appear to be unrelated: gnome the creature was invented, perhaps arbitrarily, in the 1700s, and gnome the aphorism derives from ancient Greek gnṓmē meaning “judgment.”

It was also in Greece that the tradition of filling poems with these judgments and aphorisms—originating the gnomic verse—also began.

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