The difficulty of defining poetry is in drawing a line which keeps everything poetic on one side, everything prose on the other. It can’t be alliteration or rhyme or meter or syllabification, because for every one of those, I can find oodles of poetry that don’t fit the criteria. Beowulf doesn’t use rhyme or meter (though it does used stresses), Dante’s Divine Comedy doesn’t use alliteration as a formal element, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has a form partially unconcerned with syllabification. Indeed, no literary device seems precisely suited to be the defining element.

Perhaps we should look not at the form but at the content. Is poetry more imagery-based, more emotive, more contemplative? Once again, we can find exceptions to all of these. It is true that poetry tends to be concentrate, of course, but comparing Beowulf to the Poetic Edda to Lepanto (by Chesterton) to a particularly good short story tells us that even this nebulous idea of intensity or concentration is not enough.

Thus I am unsatisfied by definitions such as Encyclopedia Britannica’s “literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm.” Simply put, that’s exactly what prose does, arranging for meaning, for sound (some of Tolkien’s sentences are a joy to read for the pure euphony), and for rhythm (which is an aspect of prose I’ll be discussing later) in order to convey specific emotions or experiences. Even the ‘imaginative awareness’ idea seems dubious to me, as I can see no particular reason to consider didactic poetry impossible, albeit very unusual- outside of children’s books.

What I propose to be the distinctive difference between prose and poetry is not what they do or use but the emphasis placed on various tools. Whereas prose, as a rule, prioritizes the meaning of the words, using literary devices and other elements (line breaks, for instance) only irregularly, poetry emphasizes the use of a select set of such devices as a primary part of its arsenal. Thus, poetry uses the sound or rhythm or spacing of the words as centrally as their lexical meaning.

Under this definition, we can see that Hebrew poetry, even translated, remains poetry, all the intense parallelism of Isaiah, all the rich imagery of the Psalms, even when certain elements, like the acrostic of Psalm __, are lost in translation. Free verse, terza rima, Old English alliterative accentual, Old Norse fornythislag,¹ ballads, villanelles, haiku, sestinas, standard hymn meters, and all the rest I know of (including Poe’s absolutely amazing poetry) fit within this definition as poetry. They all foreground the use of particular devices- rhyme, stressed syllables, and syllabification most commonly. In many cases, though not all, these uses follow a regular, formal pattern.

Prose, conversely, can and does use every single one of these devices, even (in informal works and fiction) line breaks, but it uses them supplementally and irregularly. In fact, where in poetry alliteration or rhyme or rhythm are an aid and a joy, in prose they are nearly always hidden, intentionally kept in the background where they ideally affect without being noticed (unless you’re looking for them). Often, if you notice such devices in prose, that’s an actual detriment, rather than a benefit (as in poetry). Of course, at other times we just note that this bit of prose really verges towards poetry, and that’s all right, because poetry and prose are not contraries but different ends of a continuum, with Clausewitz on one end and The Raven on the other.

Footnotes

1 – The ‘th’ in that word is a thorn in the source I get the name from, page 46 of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun (edited by Christopher Tolkien). The form referenced is the form used by Tolkien in that posthumously published poem.