Should poetry be heard and not seen?
In most, though not all, historic literary traditions, verse is distinguished from prose by the fact that the lines or stanzas are identified as such by recurrent patterns of sound (quantity, accent, rhyme, or assonance) which are independent of both the syntax and the meaning. This strict definition of verse excludes rhythmic prose like ancient Hebrew poetry and the free verse of Walt Whitman, in which the “verses” or lines are defined not by fixed, recurrent sound patterns, as in Greek hexameters or English heroic couplets, but rather by syntactical devices used in conventional prose as well, like parallelism.
