What is or is not poetry?

 What is or is not poetry?

 

After all, what on earth is this thing called poetry? Well, what is usually defined as poetry is "another way of using language". Once upon a time, at the beginning of humanity, it might have been the only way of using language, or even-even the language itself! Then came the prose. It is believed that either poetry or language was part of the rituals of the early agricultural societies.

But a short, concise and possibly one of the most apt definitions of poetry is that given by Nobel Prize laureate W.B. Yeats, who was born in 1865 (see image).