People's poetry as source of history and culture of Yemen

Folk poetry which is usually understood as vernacular poetry for centuries has played an essential role in Yemen. The poet performs plenty of functions, from preserving moral values to passing through farming instructions. That is why we can consider poetry to be a significant source on local history and culture. On the one hand it can provide real historical, geographical and statistical data, and on the other - it let us a chance to get imbued with an investigated culture, to share with locals their thoughts and feelings about this or that and to draw a more accurate picture of local society’s life. All this gets possible if some disadvantageous features of poetry as a source are taken into account, among them are authors’ subjectivity, specifity of their language, probable distortion of a poem’s original meaning in the course of time.