Yesterday, 06:41 AM
This is one of the first questions that get asked on any poetry forum. It has gotten asked here several times over the years, and you can search for those threads.
The verse forms that you mention are not from 'this day and age'. Free verse is over a century old at this point. Robert Bly wrote his prose poem The Dead Seal fifty years ago (the form being older still). Visual poetry goes back millennia, but some of the best known examples in English are from Alice in Wonderland - the mouse's tail.
To your question, obviously 'anything and everything' is not poetry. Your inherent assumption that form is poetry is unsupported. The second question about being wordsmiths is odd. How are you defining a wordsmith? I shall ignore this, as it's poorly stated, and stick to the first point.
Poetry has been written in various forms for decades, centuries, millennia. What most people mean by 'traditional verse' is the sort of rhyming poetry they learn in school. But rhyming poetry is a fairly recent invention. Old English poems like Beowulf never rhymed. The Greek epics didn't use rhyme. The psalms use rhyme occasionally. These are just within the Western tradition. Going further, Piers Plowman used rhyme, but also alliteration. No one would do that today, except as a joke.
The prologue to Paradise Lost states that rhyme is the invention of a barbarous age, and so forth.
Then there is free verse vs metered verse.
Metered verse is a hangover from a pre-literate age. All ancient verse is metered (when not rhyming) to make it easier to write and recite.
Shakespeare used iambic pentameter for his monologues. No modern playwright of film script writer will do that, because it doesn't make sense anymore.
The question remains as to how to define poetry. A similar question could be asked about how to define mathematics and how it differs from symbolic logic or computation. Was it cheating or 'proper maths' to use computers to 'prove' the four colour theorem?
Maths is what mathematicians decide what maths is.
Likewise, poetry is what craftsmen decide what poetry is.
Where poetry differs from prose is in that it's not a straight narration. The poet, through the use of words, is trying to create an effect that is a multiple of the mere information being conveyed. This is done by using sonics, imagery, and a sense of finding the perfect word for the perfect spot. Lyrical prose also falls loosely into this category, but differs from poetry in that economy is not as important.
Because the medium and the message are so intertwined in poetry, it is untranslatable in many cases. Or it loses a lot in the translation when you do.
Prose doesn't suffer the same problem.
The verse forms that you mention are not from 'this day and age'. Free verse is over a century old at this point. Robert Bly wrote his prose poem The Dead Seal fifty years ago (the form being older still). Visual poetry goes back millennia, but some of the best known examples in English are from Alice in Wonderland - the mouse's tail.
To your question, obviously 'anything and everything' is not poetry. Your inherent assumption that form is poetry is unsupported. The second question about being wordsmiths is odd. How are you defining a wordsmith? I shall ignore this, as it's poorly stated, and stick to the first point.
Poetry has been written in various forms for decades, centuries, millennia. What most people mean by 'traditional verse' is the sort of rhyming poetry they learn in school. But rhyming poetry is a fairly recent invention. Old English poems like Beowulf never rhymed. The Greek epics didn't use rhyme. The psalms use rhyme occasionally. These are just within the Western tradition. Going further, Piers Plowman used rhyme, but also alliteration. No one would do that today, except as a joke.
The prologue to Paradise Lost states that rhyme is the invention of a barbarous age, and so forth.
Then there is free verse vs metered verse.
Metered verse is a hangover from a pre-literate age. All ancient verse is metered (when not rhyming) to make it easier to write and recite.
Shakespeare used iambic pentameter for his monologues. No modern playwright of film script writer will do that, because it doesn't make sense anymore.
The question remains as to how to define poetry. A similar question could be asked about how to define mathematics and how it differs from symbolic logic or computation. Was it cheating or 'proper maths' to use computers to 'prove' the four colour theorem?
Maths is what mathematicians decide what maths is.
Likewise, poetry is what craftsmen decide what poetry is.
Where poetry differs from prose is in that it's not a straight narration. The poet, through the use of words, is trying to create an effect that is a multiple of the mere information being conveyed. This is done by using sonics, imagery, and a sense of finding the perfect word for the perfect spot. Lyrical prose also falls loosely into this category, but differs from poetry in that economy is not as important.
Because the medium and the message are so intertwined in poetry, it is untranslatable in many cases. Or it loses a lot in the translation when you do.
Prose doesn't suffer the same problem.