What Is And What Is Not Poetry
There’s something very un-poetic about trying to define what is and what is not poetry. Poetry doesn’t need to rhyme, it doesn’t need to have any rhythm or meter, in fact, in it’s simplest form, it could just be a sort of shopping list of words, with no obvious meaning at all.
What defines poetry, and makes it such a beautiful medium for communication, is that the message is entirely in the subtext. A poem can mean something completely different to the poet as it does to the audience; some poetry paints a vivid image in the mind, although the metaphorical meaning of that image can often be so very different.
It is this imaginative element of poetry which makes finding a definition so hard: without depth of emotion, it is merely a song without a tune; without imagery and metaphor, it is simply a list of words, so often forced down students in literature classes.
Fundamentally then, what makes a poem is not so simple to define as elements off of a checklist, it is in fact much deeper than that, it is the connection that the words make between the writer and the reader, the images conjured, the metaphorical connections made. While these may not be the same for both poet and audience, if they do not exist, then perhaps the piece is merely a list of words, and no poem at all.
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