What is Poetry? What is poetry? What is a poem? How can you tell the difference between poetry and prose? I usually try to provide a defintion, knowing that the definition is little more than a simplified starting point for this elusive and irresistible genre. I developed this one collaboratively with my colleague at TCC, Stan Barger, who team-taught English 112 with me several summers: Poetry is the concentrated, rhythmic, verbal expression of observations, perceptions, and …showed first 75 words of 2785 total…

…showed last 75 words of 2785 total…see Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur") nonmetrical cadences Free Verse (open form): Free verse has predecessors in the nonmetrical rhythms of Greek poetry, the cadences of the King James Bible Psalms, Milton's poetry; however, the true groundbreaker for free verse rhythms was America's Walt Whitman in the nineteenth century Some Familiar Fixed (Closed) forms Sonnet Villanelle "Venus and Adonis" stanza: ABABCC (see Puritan poetry) Closed couplets Terza rima: ABA BCB CDC ("Acquainted with the Night")