differentiate between prose and poetry.?

Answer 1

It was a dark and stormy night. The lightning was the only visual followed ever so briefly by the thunder clap. Prose.

On a night, twas dark and dank,
with windows protected by a plank,
lightning flashes filled the air,
the thunder claps were everywhere. poetry

Answer 2

I must respectfully disagree with Garwy's assessment of prose and poetry. He is making a perhaps overly exacting semantic distinction based on one unique exception, the sub-genre of the prose poem, but that doesn't necessarily invalidate making distinctions between the two major genres of prose and poetry. In fact, my copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms actually states as part of its definition of verse, "poetry, as distinct from prose."

To me, it would be like trying to say there are no differences between the United States and Britain because they have a common history and language. But by only looking at the exceptions to their respective uniqueness, we fail to see the bigger picture.

I do agree there is a point where the distinction between prose and poetry can get hazy, i.e., what really is the difference between a short short story (a sub-genre that Irving Howe had argued was distinct from "normal" short stories) versus a prose poem? If I were drawing a Venn Diagram of where the genres met, I might put the prose poem and the short short story in the intersecting space.

Even then, I don't think it would be unreasonable to argue that a prose poem still constitutes poetry while a short short story still constitutes prose. Even if a prose poem lacks verse lines, there is a heightened level of sustained attention to the relationships of words insofar as meaning and sound within a self-contained structure that prose does not require at the same qualitative level.

Admittedly, it's tangled mess, when one tries to split hairs at this level, but if I were to ask a publisher, librarian, or academic to separate a pile of books into poetry or prose, I don't think there would be as much equivocating.

But by and large to the general reading public, prose as a genre covers those literary means of expression such as fiction and nonfiction while poetry covers a huge array of forms and means of expression that typically (though not always) come in verse lines. Yes, not all poetry comes in verse form, but critics and academics have argued distinctions between poetry and prose based on more subjective and elusive qualities of "poetic merit" that I mentioned previously.

It's a perfectly fair distinction to make between prose and poetry, whether or not the question was precipitated by a teacher (I have no context for your question to assume so). It's a comparison that deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Answer 3

Prose is a normal or ordinary form of writing based on our everyday way or style of talking. It's simply natural.

While poetry is rather fanciful. With meter, rhyme and all that.... prose is just like a kind of speech.

Answer 4

you cannot differentiate between prose and poetry, since there are prose poems (the psalms for example, and also the works of thomas traherne and much of william blake).

the differentiation is between prose and verse (see my answer to your other question).

....

if your teacher think that there is a difference between prose and poetry she is incompetent.

humour her (she is bigger than you are) but be careful not to trust anything she says (even if it is only to tell you that it is raining).

Answer 5

Prose- the ordinary form of spoken or written language, without metrical structure, as distinguished from poetry or verse. Poetry- the art of rhythmical composition, written or spoken, for exciting pleasure by beautiful, imaginative, or elevated thoughts.

Answer 6

www.prose-n-poetry.com