Before Judson Jerome attended a class on poetry at the University of Chicago, he wrote unrhymed free verse. His tutor was J. V. Cunningham, an epigrammist who distinguished himself from the prevalent fashion by writing in traditional, formal style. The class influenced Jerome so much that from then on he wrote predominantly metrical, rhyming poetry. A quote by Cunningham is used on the first page of a popular recent book about poetry, the Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry, broken into lines to make it look like an epigram:

[So far as I'm concerned,]
Poetry is metrical writing.
If it isn't that I don't know what it is.

The bracketed section is what was left out of the book. I could not disagree more that poetry is metrical writing. The Dictionary of Literary Biography says that Cunningham rejected “the usual Romantic and mystical pseudodefinitions” of poetry of the period. But I do not think that Cunningham's definition is any less of a pseudodefinition, and I will refute his before attempting to provide my own here.

Elton John was once asked to make an impromptu song out of something which was as prosaic as possible. An audience member had brought a vacuum cleaner instruction manual, and Elton produced a pretty good song from it. This was Elton making lyrical poetry out of the manual, without changing any of the words.

Now imagine if somebody made Hamlet: The Musical! All of the soliloquies would be sung as arias instead of acted. The effect this would have is also, sadly, easy to imagine. So dull things can be made to shine, and all that glitters is not necessarily gold in the musical West End.

In 1801, Coleridge translated a poem by Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg-Stolberg, commonly known as Stolberg. He improved as well as translated it, saying that his version is “more poetical than the original”. Coleridge then gives a very literal translation of the original into English, without the punctuation of the original, given here with punctuation restored:

Still play, juggling Deceiver!
Still play thy wanton Dances,
Fugitive child of Vapor, that fervently temptest
Onward the Wanderer's feet;

Then coyly fleest, at length beguilest into Ruin
These maiden Wiles! I know them,
Learnt them all, out of thy blue eyes,
Fickle Nais!

And this is the version by Coleridge:

Lunatic Witch-fires! Ghosts of Light & Motion!
Fearless I see you weave your wanton Dances
Near me, far off me, You that tempt the Trav'ller
Onward & onward,

Wooing, retreating, till the Swamp beneath him
Groans!—And 'tis dark!—This Woman's Wile—I know it!
Learnt it from thee, from thy perfidious Glances,
Black-ey'd Rebecca!—

To check whether a poem is dependent on the metre, one good test is to make another version of it, using synonyms wherever possible and rearranging the clauses whilst keeping the sense. This can sometimes ruin connotations and other important things, so it doesn't always work, but as a rule of thumb it's a good thing to try. Here's an attempt at prosing Coleridge's version:

“You crazy sorceress-fires, you spirits of movement and brightness! I see you weave your gyrating dances by me now, then far away—you, who lure the wanderer ever on and on. You draw him to you, and then you recede, until the dark marsh below his feet mutters. I know this womanly way well, Rebecca, having learned it from you. I learned it from your deceitful looks, from your own dark eyes.”

This is quite a successful prosing, with a roughly similar amount of poetic feeling as Coleridge's version. In fact it loses some elements, some of the compactness and cadence which expresses the emotion of the talker, and gains some, such as the clarity of expression. Indeed, reading my version of the poem back helps me to understand the poem more. (Or poems, depending on whether you're a lumper or a splitter.) The prose version does lose a lot of the personality of Coleridge, but that is a problem which Coleridge would have been able to avoid if he had made a prose version.

So we found here that a little of the expression was in the metre, but that we were able to make up for it in another domain by making the poem clearer. So where is the poetry, and what is the poetry, if it isn't the metre? We could try to keep changing the words and the sense until it becomes non poetic, but we won't because we'd just run up against the Sorites paradox as people still can't handle radial categories and such.

Ezra Pound said that you can charge words using phanopoeia or melopoeia, using images and sound. I tried to remove the melopoeia as much as possible, replacing for example the alliteration of “weave your wanton” with “weave your gyrating”. But I also introduced some, in “womanly way well”, adding an extra “w” word compared to the original. It's hard to avoid. What is most prevalent in the poem in Pound's terms, however, is the phanopoeia, the images. The sorceress or the witch and her flames gives a mental picture very quickly, and it is developed very quickly into a great portrait of the irrlicht or ignis fatuus.

As well as the images, we have lots of metaphor. The irrlicht weaves its dances, and weaving and dancing are human activities. This makes us think of the irrlicht as possibly having other human qualities, of perhaps even being conscious. But the setting is a nocturne, this is a witch fire, so there is association with the dark arts, with the occult. These little metaphors are encapsulated in the great metaphor, or perhaps more strictly an analogy, that the irrlicht is actually the womanly wiles, the female way.

This larger analogy is realised in a strange way. What we start out with is a portrait of the irrlicht, sketched as an irrlicht, and there is no sign that it will turn out to be an analogy. After the extended description, we break instantly into the analogy: Stolberg just says “these maiden wiles” and Coleridge “this woman's wile”. We go straight into this surprising analogy, and have to realise quickly why it may be apposite.

We'll investigate one more example of the poetry from this Sapphic. The atmosphere of the piece is what might be called Romantic, in that it has gothic elements and subsists in the sublime rather than the beautiful. In fact I would say that when pondered carefully, the piece transcends the gothic and the sublime, making us think of a very charged and ethereal atmosphere, something that I call a metatrope. This is quite common in poetry, especially in the best poetry, but I'm not sure how much control the poet really has over this kind of expression, as opposed to sublimity, beauty, and the other features such as metaphor and phanopoeia.

But we have sufficient materials here, I think, to provide an answer. What is poetry? Metre, we have discovered, is not necessarily very important in poetry. When we looked for what might be important, we actually found many separate and interwoven things. We found phanopoeia, the projection of mental images and situations. We found metaphor, and that was used in two very different ways. And we found sublimity and perhaps metatropicality, charging the poem with an electric energy. There are probably many other things that we could find too, and all from a very short poem!

We find that poetry is made from a soup of important features, and that likely none of them are by themselves sufficient, and many may not even be necessary. Metre may count as one of these features too, but like the others it is neither sufficient, nor, I hope I have demonstrated, even necessary. The more of these features that some writing possesses, the more likely it is to be poetic.