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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29097
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29097
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Well, it's a very old question, and one that is not likely to get a definitive answer. It is perhaps worth making a distinction between poetry and verse. Verse is a literary form that is characterized by the use of rhythm to achieve literary effects, the most foundational of which is simply to make it easier to remember. Verse arises out of the oral tradition where stories were spoken, not written, and using verse made it easier to remember them. Verse can be defined, therefore, by certain technical properties, even if not everyone will agree on which technical properties qualify.

The word poetry, on the other hand, seems to have two principal uses: one is as a synonym for verse, the other as a term of artistic judgement, perhaps we might say a matter of affect (in the literary sense of the word).

There are a couple of [infamous lines from Wordsworth](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Lyrical_ballads,_Volume_1,_Wordsworth,_1800.djvu/92):

> I've measured it from side to side:  
> 'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.

Verse? Certainly. Poetry? Maybe not. It is closer to technical writing than anything else.

Life would be simple enough if we were willing to say that poetry was verse with affect. But if someone insists on separating poetry from verse, then how do you tell poetry from prose with affect (since any good novel is prose with affect)?

And I don't see how we can go any further down that road without this becoming entirely a matter of opinion, and thus entirely off topic.

Original score: 29