What's the diffrence between poetry and delineated prose?

[Seraphim]

Must admit to having skimmed the discussion up to now a bit.  So if this point has already been made or passed, apologies.

Another way to look at the distinction between prose and poetry (or verse) is that poetry is performance while prose is communication - in its pure form, without performance.  (It's possible to speak or write prose artfully, but without its becoming poetry... so this may be incomplete or incorrect.  On the other hand, some free verse - especially political poetry - becomes very prosaic in its single-minded attempt to deliver a message despite compressed language and extended typography.)

One last thought, also likely inaccurate:  prose translates, poetry does not.  Maybe it employs a language's unstranslatable backstory where prose contains only elements all languages have in common.

P.S. It's easy to imagine a language the basic grammar of which has rules resulting in what would look like verse to us - rhyming, rhythm and the like that native speakers would supply as unconsciously as English-speakers use thuh or thee, a or an depending on the next word, only a bit more complex.  Its prose would be enjoyable (for us) to hear, but still prose because it was natural, neither made special nor performance.

I agree poetry is an oral art, something I feel people often forget. I wouldn't call it performance, per se, although some attempt to make it so. As for prose not being performance, as a former competitive after-dinner speaker (yes, such a thing exists lol), our speeches were very much performance. So I have a hard time accepting 'performance' as a basis of distinction.

I also agree poetry is nigh impossible to translate well - it always seems to lose something because languages are cultural, audiences are cultural, and poetics in various languages are different. Prose has it's own translation difficulty as well, but poetry translators are also trying to capture the poetic art of a piece, something which prose translators - even when dealing artful prose - don't have to contend.

I think ultimately it has to do with form. A novel tells a story, is usually atleast 100 pages and more likely 200-300 pages or more. A short story is usually around a page or up to 10 or so. There are exceptions, like the Iliad or the Dunciad. These are essentailly novels in poetic form. Just as Shakespeares plays are plays in poetic form. Poetry is usually, again there are exceptions, no more than two or three pages. Form is important because form follows function, (as architects say) and the function of a poem is different from the function of a novel, etc. As to content, I think it was Rimbaud ( there may have been others) who first put a short prose poem into 'A Season in Hell' his final poetry collection. So short prose poems became a form of poetry. Everything else applies to all forms, use of language, use of imagery, condensation. That can happen in poetry, plays, TV dialogue and novels and short stories. Perhaps only in poetry is rhyme important, many regard it as old fashioned but rhyme is an important element in poetry. It is also vital in most songs. Song and poetry are first cousins. Ultimatrly good writing as poetry is about sound, meaning and melody. These elements exist in all language both written and spoken. Melody is created by how words and the elements of words ( syllables, consonants and vowels) are combined to make a melody. A phonetic expert can explain this scientifically but most of use just use our ears. It applies much more to song but without it the poetic disappears from writing. A lot of novels contain poetry, as do plays and poetry is everywhere really but it has to be subtracted from a wider context. Poetry as poetry eliminates any other context. Understanding language and imagery is necessary for all fiction writing.

A couple points of contention concerning form as a delineator of poetry and prose.

For a formalist poet, form provides a template for repetitive elements of writing. Sometimes form becomes associated function: both the English sonnet and the Japanese tanka were considered ideal for expressing romantic sentiment. But function was never a requirement for these forms.

There is a connection between poetry and lyric. But lyric relies on pitch and the duration of a musical note (quarter note, half note etc). Poetics in English relies on meter, whether the poet uses it consciously or not. Melody is based on the music. The closet poetry can come is a well executed rhythm - but it does not use pitch nor duration. What is does use is one of the topics I like to see discussed here - on a different thread.

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Also wanted to mention that prose has various forms of its own; paragraphs have various structures, plots are graphed, etc. And length doesn't determine how a piece of prose is labeled, except perhaps for the convenience of having a label. IMO.

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Form. This is in paragraph form. Is it prose? Or has it achieved the level of poetry?

"In the season leaves should love, since it gives them leave to move through the wind, towards the ground they were watching while they hung, legend says there is a seam stitching darkness like a name. Now when dying grasses veil earth from the sky in one last pale wave, as autumn dies to bring winter back, and then the spring, we who die ourselves can peel back another kind of veil that hangs among us like thick smoke. Tonight at last I feel it shake. I feel the nights stretching away thousands long behind the days till they reach the darkness where all of me is ancestor. I move my hand and feel a touch move with me, and when I brush my own mind across another, I am with my mother's mother.
Sure as footsteps in my waiting self, I find her, and she brings arms that carry answers for me, intimate, a waiting bounty.

"Carry me."

She leaves this trail through a shudder of the veil, and leaves, like amber where she stays, a gift for her perpetual gaze."