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Readers know a poem when they see it, but poetry does more than exist as a form:  poetry portrays and often dramatizes the experience of human emotional life.

But can’t one say the same thing about a short story, play, or novel?  Yes, poetic language can be employed even in newspaper articles, but for a specific piece of work to be a poem, it must sit on the page as a poem.  Poems are often confused with song lyrics; they are seldom confused with plays, short stories, or novels.  Even long poems like Paradise Lost are easily recognized as poems.

The Difficulty of Defining Art

Any definition of any art form will ultimately ring empty, because as soon as the thinker defines the art, it changes.  Nevertheless, there are parameters that roughly determine some basic features and qualities of an art form that become indisputable.

For example, if you take some paint and form letters that say, “Garage Sale,” and then you form several colorful items like a chair and sweater, no one would confuse this product with a painting; although, it used paint as its medium.  And you would not be considered a painter because of your creation.  If you scribble some riming words on a birthday card, no one would confuse your creation with poetry.  We might ascribe the term “verse” to your product, simply because it rimes, but this riming verse would not make you a poet.

The following is a basic definition of a poem based more on what it does than what it is: “A poem is an artistic representation of what it feels like to experience the emotional life of a human being.”

Therefore, a poem’s main purpose is to express the experience of human emotion.  But along with the expression of emotion, the poet must employ knowledge as well as feeling, but still that knowledge is put to use in service of expressing the feeling, not just to inform, as a news report would do.

Wide Margins

Often, when poets try to define poetry, they are, in fact, describing what they think is “good” poetry, and not what constitutes the definition of a poem qua poem.  From experience, most readers become aware that a poem looks a certain way on a page—it is surrounded by more space producing wider margins than a story or an essay has.  It may or may not rime, but it usually has line breaks that affect the reading some way, because if you rearrange the poet’s lines, a nuance of meaning is lost.

It is easier to decide what good poetry is than what actually constitutes a poem by definition.  Most readers, scholars, critics, and poetry lovers in general rely on their intuition to determine what a poem is: they know it when they see it.  But those same individuals become very specific when deciding what a “good” poem is vis-à-vis a “bad” poem.

Poem vs. Song Lyric

The following is an excerpt from a poem by Emily Dickinson:

You know it is a poem just by the way it looks on the page compared to the prose text surrounding it.  But what about the following?:

Some day some old familiar rain

Will come along and know my name.

And then my shelter will be gone

And I'll have to move along.

It looks a lot like the poem above, but it is actually an excerpt for a song lyric by songwriter, Rod McKuen. 

The main difference between a poem and a song is form not content.  The song lyric is more dependent on rime and meter than the poem.  The song lyric is usually less dense than the poem, that is, while the song may employ the same literary devices as the poem, it usually does so less frequently.  The audience for a song is usually less focused on the words than on the melody, while the poem focuses entirely on the words.

(This article originally appeared on Suite101.com on April 7, 2008.)