Most students have encountered poetry at some point in their lives. The word “poetry” might make one think of rhyming, romance, or perhaps, William Shakespeare. How do we recognize poetry, though, and how is it different from other forms of writing?

It can be difficult to distinguish poetry from prose, but there are some key differences between the two. Prose is the type of writing that we encounter most of the time. It’s in our newspapers, novels, social media posts, and text messages. Prose is written in complete sentences and paragraphs, and the lines run straight to the margins. Think of it as our typical way of writing. In fact, you are reading prose right now!

Poetry, on the other hand, is not always written in complete sentences, and it does not typically run all the way to the margins. We do not use poetry as frequently as we use prose, as it is reserved for specific artistic purposes. Poetry is more likely to use abstract images and figurative language (something we will discuss shortly) to express thoughts, while prose tends to be more straightforward.

Why write poetry?

For starters, it is important to remember that poetry is an artform. Poets create artistic pieces using their words. Poets might use their art to ponder profound emotions, express love for someone, create beautiful mental images, or even to tell complex stories. They create experiences that audience members can each interpret differently, which is not as easily attained with prose.

Poetry has historical and cultural significance, too. For most of human history, only a small percentage of people were literate. This meant that a vast majority of people would never learn to read or write, which made it much harder to share and remember stories. They could, however, remember words much more easily when they could recite them with rhythm and rhyme. This is true for nearly all of us; just imagine how long it would take you to memorize all the song lyrics you know if there were no beats or rhymes involved! Many cultures, therefore, rely on oral tradition for the preservation of myths and other stories that are central to their identities. Consider medieval poets called “scops,” who recited poetry both for entertainment and for historical purposes. We have poetry to thank for the survival of many of our historical accounts and traditions.

So, can we truly define poetry?

In terms of content, there is no way to firmly distinguish between poetry and prose. For instance, although poetry tends to delve into profound thoughts and use artistic language, prose can certainly do that, too. Poetry can also be straightforward and share complete thoughts, which prose tends to do more often. So, content is not a deciding factor.

One might also guess that length of a work could be a means of distinguishing between poetry and prose, but this is frequently not the case. While many people are used to seeing poems that are much shorter than books and articles, plenty of poems are much longer than one might expect. Take Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, for instance, which is nearly 2,000 lines long. Beowulf, a poem about a brave man who fights monsters and dragons, spans over 3,000 lines! Poems might also be extremely short, such as Stephen Crane’s “A Man Said to the Universe.”

While content and length are not reliable means of identifying poetry, we can frequently distinguish between poetry and prose by looking at structure. The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “poetry” can help us understand what exactly this means: “Composition in verse or some comparable patterned arrangement of language in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of distinctive style and rhythm.” Simply put, poetry will typically look and sound different from prose because of how the words are arranged. Let’s look at these structural elements a bit more closely.