Ethnopoetics is a method of recording oral poetry or narratives that uses poetic structures like lines and stanzas instead of prose paragraphs. It aims to capture the formal elements of poetic performance that would otherwise be lost in a written text. Ethnopoetics examines the interaction between poetic language, the social group, and the individual. It has expanded to include the analysis of cultural contexts and functions of poetic and quasi-poetic texts from anthropological and linguistic perspectives.