poem

A poem is an artifact that results from writing in which the material qualities of language — sound, rhythm, line break, spacing, image — are compositional elements alongside (or instead of) propositional content. Where an essay is organized by argument and a narrative by plot, a poem is organized by the line.

The term verse (from Latin versus, a turning of the plow, hence a line) is sometimes used as a synonym for poetry and sometimes more narrowly for metrically regular poetry, in contrast to free verse or prose poetry.

Poems range from the briefest fixed forms (haiku, epigram) to book-length works (epic, verse novel). The major modal categories are lyric (subjective, expressive), narrative (story-telling), and dramatic (voiced by characters). See Poetry for the discipline of composing poems.

Related terms

• essay — a prose artifact organized by argument
• Poetry — the discipline of composing poems
• meter — the rhythmic skeleton of formal verse
• imagery — sensory language that gives poems their concrete texture
• metaphor — figurative identification central to poetic meaning
• prosody — the study of how poems sound