So I think basic education system failed me. I remember in school, we’re taught that poems needed to rhyme and that it needed a pattern for each verse. But then.. there’s free form poetry and there’s spoken word poetry..
What makes poetry different from descriptive sentences and from songs?
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> What makes poetry different from descriptive sentences and from songs?
Nothing really. A poem can be lyrics and a poem can just be descriptive text if that’s how the artist wants to label it. It’s a pretty loose term.
Second the other comment. Historically the definition, or practice, has changed.
In English for a long time (until the 1900s) most people would have said poems have set line lengths and meters (e.g., iambic pentameter). Rhyme was still very common, but not required. (See Milton, Wordsworth.)
After Modernism, and especially once the “prose poem” becomes a normal thing, it seems like Anything Goes. Still, line length and rhythm seem to be important in most things calling themselves poems. Some would also say a higher proportion of figurative language than in most prose is required, but that’s in flux as well.
In the words of the great Leslie Knope.
anyTHING
can be slam POETry
when you say it LIKE this
I would say that a poem is distinct from a song in having no melody.
A poem is distinct from prose in that the sound made by the words is important to the piece. The obvious example is rhyme, but there could equally be alliteration, assonance, meter, rises and falls in intensity etc. Of course with spoken oratory there will be blurring at the edge cases between spoken poetry and straight speech that uses various devices to increase impact.
A poem is a piece of art made from the sound of words. Kind of like lyrics to a song, but the words themselves make the music.
The words’ meanings can be important too, but like song lyrics sometimes they aren’t terribly sensible out of context.
There’s also a subset of this where the appearance of the words on the page form a piece of visual art.
Poetry uses a wider range of the resources of language. Fiction typically ignores the sound of language, but poems are written with attention to sound. While all kinds of literature uses metaphor and other figures of speech, poetry uses them more intensively. Since modernism, poems have typically been short, but that wasn’t always true previously.
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