by Jaime Skelton

Created on: February 06, 2008

Poetry are words that dance along the mind, that flow along the tongue, in rhythmic cadence. It is a play with words, in which sound and sense interchange along the pathways of the mind. But rhythm does not follow rhyme, nor rhyme follow rhythm, though often they pair together. Take into consideration the following poem, "A Clear Midnight," by Walt Whitman:

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars.

There is no rhyme; and yet, when spoken, the poem rolls like a prayer from the tongue, a mystic chant to the soul. It reads nothing like the choppy pace of a sentence of prose, like the very words of this article that surround it. So does this make it poetry, or prose? By all sense, as a written word, the piece could be called prose; but it contains something more, a special rhythm and quality of words and metaphor that take it away from the formal and informal vocabulary of sentences. It reaches beyond the mundane world of fiction and non-fiction, into the world within our subconscious.

Poetry can rhyme, and it can meter, but it does not have to possess these characteristics to be poetry; just as a book does not need to possess individual chapters or 300 pages to be considered a novel. Rather, instead, we should look at the form and intention of such works. It is unfair to any work to say it is not poetry, not art, simply because it does not follow a rhyming or metrical convention; while poetry forms are beautiful, they also bear limits which do not always allow for freedom of expression. We should celebrate the beauty of expression, not the adherence to form.

Learn more about this author, Jaime Skelton.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.