: Re: What makes a poem a poem? Warning: long question. To start it off lightheartedly, here is the topic as doggerel. There are plenty of questions with titles like these: "What is this form?" —

@Kaufman555

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Let me propose that poetry is action in more dimensions than prose is (or at least, in different dimensions).

That is to say, if you're writing prose, and a rhythmic pattern in your emphasis happens to arise, you probably ignore it. Just like if you're throwing rubber balls across a room, and one happens to fall through that metal hoop at the other end of the room, it doesn't really matter. Now, if you're playing basket ball, the whole point is whether the ball goes through the hoop. If you were playing dodge ball, on the other hand, it might matter if the ball that fell through the hoop hits someone, and what part of them it hits, but probably not that it went through the hoop.

Poetry is about imposing and then following rules of some kind - rules which are not important when the objective is to be merely persuasive, or explanatory.

You chose to exclude line breaks, and then pointed out that things often do not sound like poetry without them. That seems silly to me. "If I take the roofs off of houses, they don't seem much like buildings anymore. And when I put up a roof somewhere that there wasn't an official building, it now kind of seems like a building." So is a building a roof?

Line breaks make it more obvious that you are, in fact, observing a repeating rhythm (metre), or a regularity of repeating sounds (rhyme, assonance, etc).

So is poetry just a set of (self-imposed) rules? Kind of. There's more to it, of course, and we call things that are not poems "poetic" because they remind us of the feeling we get from poetry. Because the point of being aware of and manipulating similarities of sound and rhythm is alter the sensation-level awareness of what is being said. When there are patterns in a phrase, the phrase may become more memorable. If the patterns also lay the emphasis squarely on words or phrases you want to have greater emphasis, you are building on top of the basic dimensions (like rhythm and rhyme) to create yet another dimension - enhanced emphasis.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., in 'The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table' remarked, half-jokingly:

One gets tired to death of the old, old rhymes, such as you see in that [not included here] copy of verses,—which I don’t mean to abuse, or to praise either.
I always feel as if I were a cobbler, putting new top-leathers to an old pair of boot-soles and bodies, when I am fitting sentiments to these venerable jingles
. . . . . youth
. . . . . morning
. . . . . truth
. . . . . warning
Nine tenths of the “Juvenile Poems” written spring out of the above musical and suggestive coincidences.

The great controversy in recent times, over what makes something a poem, or not a poem, comes down to how loose the self-imposed rules can be while still achieving a sufficiently poetic effect to alter how the text is perceived (as something in more stylistic dimensions than a flat statement).

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