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How to tell if something is a poem or not. Like for example this below me. That one seems so simple without any Supposition like personification. If it's a poem, without personification etc. Is it even a good poem.

A delusional idiot, i am. I know you are not, i love you even more. I know you never spark a thought of me, i love you even more.

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    The question is unclear : Are you asking what fundamentally constitutes a poem ? and then how the example you have provided does satisfies these fundamentals characteristics?
    – schweppz
    Commented Dec 10, 2023 at 12:14
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    A related question. (Should John Donne's "No man is an island" be considered poetry?) Now that poetry does not need rhyme or meter, questions like this may have become unanswerable.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Dec 10, 2023 at 13:15
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    Related question on how to recognize a poem.
    – verbose
    Commented Dec 10, 2023 at 18:41
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    Hi @Bobi brai and welcome to litSE. Could you edit the question to include the source of the poem? Though it looks likely this question will be voted closed, this sort of detail would be appreciated in any of your future questions too.
    – Adam Burke
    Commented Dec 12, 2023 at 0:52

1 Answer 1

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As some of the commenters have begun to explain, how to recognise a poem is a very vexed and complex question. Especially now that traditional structures, such as the sonnet or haiku, or rules, such as rhyme schemes, are no longer considered necessary for good and valid poetry.

I will, however, briefly address the sub-questions you pose about something being too "simple" and "without personification" to qualify as poetry. Here is a poem by Ezra Pound called In a Station of the Metro.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

That's it. That's the whole poem. This is clearly "simple" and "lacks personification" yet Pound is considered one of the leading lights of 20th century poetry, someone who purposefully played and experimented with the medium to try and get the effects he desired.

This particular poem - which started much longer before Pound deliberately edited it down to what he saw as its bare essentials - has been called the shortest in the canon. So it's certainly seen as a poem by literary critics, despite its brevity, indicating that neither length nor personification are fundamentals of poetry.

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    "As some of the commenters have begun to explain, how to recognise a poem is a very vexed and complex question." - shouldn't there at least be a condensed summary of ideas? Because at a first glance, this certainly seems like the definition of poem is pretty much like a definition of pornography - "I know it when I see it"
    – DVK
    Commented Dec 11, 2023 at 14:21
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    @DVK I might have attempted it had the question been phrased better, or more focussed, or not looking likely to be closed. But as it stands, that's not actually what the OP was asking: he wanted to know if the specific passage quoted was a poem.
    – Matt Thrower
    Commented Dec 11, 2023 at 14:54

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