1. Definition & Nature of Poetry

2. Contents
1- Defining Poetry
2- Nature of Poetic Texts

3. What is Poetry?
Poetry is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose.
Poetry may use condensed or compressed form to convey emotion or ideas to the reader's or listener's mind or ear; it may also use devices such as assonance and repetition to achieve musical or incantatory effects.

4. What is Poetry? Meaning Word association imagery Musical qualities
Poems frequently rely for their effect on imagery, word association, and the musical qualities of the language used. The interactive layering of all these effects to generate meaning is what marks poetry.
imagery
Musical qualities
Word association
Meaning

5. What is Poetry?
William Wordsworth: ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility’
Emily Dickinson said, "If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry" 
Dylan Thomas defined poetry this way: "Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing."
All agreed on poetry is a collection of emotions & feelings represented lingistically in words.

6. Poetry & Prose
Prose
The ordinary form of spoken or written language, without metrical structure, as distinguished from poetry or verse.
Matter-of-fact, commonplace, or dull expression, quality, discourse, etc.
Prose is the form of written language that is not organized according to formal patterns of verse. It may have some sort of rhythm and some devices of repetition and balance, but these are not governed by regularly sustained formal arrangement. The significant unit is the sentence, not the line. Hence it is represented without line breaks in writing.

7. Differences between Poetry & Prose
The Birds and the Foxes by James Thurber
Once upon a time there was a bird sanctuary in which hundreds of Baltimore orioles lived together happily. The refuge consisted of a forest entirely surrounded by a high wire fence. When it was put up, a pack of foxes who lived nearby protested that it was an arbitrary and unnatural boundary. However, they did nothing about it at the time because they were interested in civilizing the geese and ducks on the neighboring farms. When all the geese and ducks had been civilized, and there was nothing left to eat, the foxes once more turned their attention to the bird sanctuary. Their leader announced that there had once been foxes in the sanctuary but that they had been driven out. He proclaimed that Baltimore orioles belonged in Baltimore. He said, furthermore, that the orioles in the sanctuary were a continuous menace to the peace in the world. The other animals cautioned the foxes not to disturb the birds in their sanctuary. So the foxes attacked the sanctuary one night and tore down the fence that surrounded it. The orioles rushed out and were instantly killed and eaten by the foxes. The next day the leader of the foxes, a fox who claimed that God was receiving daily guidance from him, got upon the rostrum and addressed the other foxes. His message was simple and sublime. "You see before you," he said, "another Lincoln. We have liberated all those birds!

8. Differences between Poetry & Prose
Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 
In the forests of the night; 
What immortal hand or eye, 
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? 
In what distant deeps or skies. 
Burnt the fire of thine eyes? 
On what wings dare he aspire? 
What the hand, dare seize the fire? 

9. Nature of Poetry
To ask ‘What is poetry?’ is very much like asking ‘What is literature?’ and in fact the answers to both these questions overlap: Poetry is perceived as fictional, it uses specialized language, in many cases it lacks a pragmatic function, it is also ambiguous.
There are a number of outward signs that indicate a poem:
Most obviously, the individual text lines in poetry do not fill the entire width of the page. Thus, before they have actually started reading, readers of poetry are given an instant indication that what they are going to read is probably a poem.
In consequence, a reader’s attention is likely to focus on ‘poetic features’ of the text.

10. Nature of Poetry
Poetry is often associated not only with specialized language but with a very dense use of such specialized language.
Poems usually try to express their meaning in much less space than, say, a novel or even a short story.
Alexander Pope once explained that he preferred to write poetry even when he wrote about philosophy because it enabled him to express himself more briefly
As a result of its relative brevity, poetry tends to make more concentrated use of formal elements, it displays a tendency for structural, phonological, morphological and syntactic over-structuring, a concept which originated in formalist and structuralist criticism.

11. Nature of Poetry
Poetry is often associated not only with specialized language but with a very dense use of such specialized language.
Poems usually try to express their meaning in much less space than, say, a novel or even a short story.
Alexander Pope once explained that he preferred to write poetry even when he wrote about philosophy because it enabled him to express himself more briefly
As a result of its relative brevity, poetry tends to make more concentrated use of formal elements, it displays a tendency for structural, phonological, morphological and syntactic over-structuring, a concept which originated in formalist and structuralist criticism.

12. Nature of Poetry
Over-structuring means that poetry uses elements such as sound patterns, verse and meter, rhetorical devices, style, stanza form or imagery in an well- formulized way more frequently than other types of text.
Poetry is not written arbitrarily
John Hollander remarks that not all poems use all these elements and not all verse is poetry
Modern poets deliberately flaunt reader’s expectations about poetic language. Nonetheless, most poetry depends on the aesthetic effects of a formalized use of language.

13. Nature of Poetry
Some people associate poetry with subjectivity and the expression of intense personal experience. While this is true for some poetry, especially lyrical poetry, there are a great number of poems this does not apply to; for example narrative poems
Just as it is often misleading to identify the author of a novel with its narrator, one should not assume that the author of a poem is identical with its speaker and thus even lyrical poems cannot be treated as subjective expressions of the author.
The two levels of author and speaker should always be kept separate.
The communication situation in poetry is very similar to the one in prose, except that poetry very often does not include dialogue.

14. Nature of Poetry
Some people associate poetry with subjectivity and the expression of intense personal experience. While this is true for some poetry, especially lyrical poetry, there are a great number of poems this does not apply to; for example narrative poems
Just as it is often misleading to identify the author of a novel with its narrator, one should not assume that the author of a poem is identical with its speaker and thus even lyrical poems cannot be treated as subjective expressions of the author.
The two levels of author and speaker should always be kept separate.
The communication situation in poetry is very similar to the one in prose, except that poetry very often does not include dialogue.

15. Nature of Poetry
Other readers look for ‘universal truth’ or some other deeper meaning in poetry more than in prose, the famous nineteenth-century critic Matthew Arnold for instance. Again, while some poetry might very well deal with universal truths, this is probably not the case for all. There is no doubt some poetry which is very lovely and very popular but which, at bottom, is really neither very profound nor the expression of a universal truth.
It is difficult to answer the question ‘What is Poetry?’ conclusively, though most people are more or less able to recognize poetry when they see it.

16. Nature of Poetry In a nutshell, poetic texts have a tendency to
Relative brevity
Dense expression
Express subjectivity more than other texts
Display a musical or songlike quality
Be structurally and phonologically over structured
Be syntactically and morphologically over structured
Deviate from everyday language aesthetic self-referentiality (which means that they draw attention to themselves as art form both through the form in which they are written and through explicit references to the writing of poetry)