every line

[rayheinrich]

A poem is the sum of its lines. A line is poetic because it's part of a poem. Maybe that person
meant a line wasn't poetic because it didn't have poetic imagery? What was told to you doesn't
seem logical to me. I've copied in the P.S. below an example of a famous poem written by
a famous poet, Henry Thoreau. If you look at many of the lines in the poem individually, they
certainly don't have poetic imagery. In fact, lots of them are just pretty mundane. But when
Thoreau combines them, they become a powerful poem.

I Knew A Man By Sight - Henry D. Thoreau

I Knew A Man By Sight

I knew a man by sight,
A blameless wight,
Who, for a year or more,
Had daily passed my door,
Yet converse none had had with him.
I met him in a lane,
Him and his cane,
About three miles from home,
Where I had chanced to roam,
And volumes stared at him, and he at me.

In a more distant place
I glimpsed his face,
And bowed instinctively;
Starting he bowed to me,
Bowed simultaneously, and passed along.

Next, in a foreign land
I grasped his hand,
And had a social chat,
About this thing and that,
As I had known him well a thousand years.

Late in a wilderness
I shared his mess,
For he had hardships seen,
And I a wanderer been;
He was my bosom friend, and I was his.

And as, methinks, shall all,
Both great and small,
That ever lived on earth,
Early or late their birth,
Stranger and foe, one day each other know.

But... Poetry? Prose? I personally don't see that there's that much difference. As far as I can figure,
it's mostly about formatting. It's pretty easy to take a paragraph out of a novel, write it down in a
series of boxes (think inside the box) and presto, it's a poem. I've done that, as a joke, quite a few
times and nobody, unless they know the novel, can tell the difference. But of the remaining differences:
If you look at a few hundred different pieces of writing that have been categorized as poetry or prose,
there's such a smooth slide from one to the other that any sort of decision seems arbitrary to me and
varies greatly from one person to another. - - But then, people have wanted me to make a distinction
(like editors and what-not), so I try to figure out if they want it boxed or unboxed and give them what
they want. I'm a weasel. I mean really, shouldn't it be about what it says and not about what it's called?