What is the difference between prose and poetry?

Answer 1

Prose is writing distinguished from poetry by its greater variety of rhythm and its closer resemblance to the patterns of everyday speech. The word prose comes from the Latin prosa, meaning straightforward, hence the term "prosaic," which is often seen a perjorative. Prose describes the type of writing that prose embodies, unadorned with obvious stylistic devices. Prose writing is usually adopted for the description of facts or the discussion of whatever one's thoughts are, incorporated in free flowing speech.

Poetry (from the Greek "poiesis", a "making" or "creating") is a form of art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its ostensible meaning. Poetry may be written independently, as discrete poems, or may occur in conjunction with other arts, as in poetic drama, hymns or lyrics.

Answer 2

If you want it in layman's terms, poetry is composed of lines and stanzas, while prose is composed of sentences and paragraphs.

There are a lot of places where poetry and prose overlap. Poetry doesn't necessarily have to have lyrical devices to it, but this does make it more distinguishable from prose.
The best way to decide whether to use poetry or prose is to decide which would be more effective. Sometimes, people just want things in plain sentences.
Other times, it's better to have line breaks.

Here's William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow":

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

That poem could easily be made into prose:

So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rain water, beside the white chickens.

And yet, with the line breaks and the division into syllabic metrical feet it makes the piece come alive more.
For longer, more descriptive pieces, it's best to use prose. For example, adding line breaks and meter to something by Tolstoy would just complicate it.
However, when you want to make a real point in your writing, when you want to emphasize certain words, or when you want to highlight certain points of a sentence that would be lost with prose, then poetry is the way to go.

Answer 3

Yes, that's exactly it. Many people, though, use the terms *verse* and prose rather than *poetry* and prose to make this distinction, but yeah, that's it. The line breaks in poetry/verse enable the writer to do things that can't be done in prose. See Charles O. Hartman's book "Free Verse" for much more on how writers use this to achieve various effects.

Answer 4

Honestly, this is a very difficult question, and for me, impossible to answer. I disagree with other answerers who say that poetry is written "in verse". There are poems not written in verse at all, and yet they are still called poems.
Up to around the 16th C, poetry just meant "fiction". In his book An Apology for Poetry, Sir Philip Sidney defends literature in general. When prose works began to be more common (let's say, 18th C and the rise of the novel), it became easy to differentiate between prose and poetry. But with the end of "conventional" poetic codes (with the beginning of Dadaism and Surrealism at the beginning of the 20th C), it has become impossible (to me) to define poetry. Anything can be called "poetry". There can be "poetry" in prose. So, your question is very good, but has no answer...

Answer 5

Poetry is a genre and prose is a mode.

Poetry speaks of a type of writing that generally cares about line breaks. Poems are written line by line. Sometimes these line breaks are measured formally, as in metered verse, and sometimes they are left to the whim of the writer, as in free verse.

Prose on the other hand is a mode of writing that utilizes paragraphs instead of line breaks. Prose is written sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph.

Thus, you can have a fictional prose narrative (untrue, paragraph-formed story) or a fictional narrative poem (untrue story written in verse lines).

Of course, the English language is full of ambiguities and you will see one in the prose poem.

A prose poem is a poem written in a paragraph form, but has all the other characteristics of a poem such as rhythm and meter.

Answer 6

Prose is fiction (novels, short stories), and poetry is ... poetry, or verse.
Think paragraphs versus stanzas, or versus song lyrics, that type of thing.
:)
c-r

Answer 7

Poetry can be sung while prose can't be sung:D

Answer 8

The lines have blurred, but basically poetry is short; it makes its point much quicker.

Answer 9

This is an interesting question, and one that made me curious for many years.

Answer 10

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