Does poetry have to rhyme to be good?
Many people have had the assumption from an early age that poetry is distinct from prose in that poetry is rhyming and metered, whereas prose is not. In a lot of cases, that definition holds true, but it misses the point of a lot of what poets do. I like to think of poetry in the context of the larger concept of art. Compare it to painting, for example. Many painters paint realistic portraits of people, or a still life or a landscape, and that can be beautiful. They are taking pigments and putting them on canvas in such a way as to make an image that resonates with us. Poets do the same, only they use words as their medium, rather than paints. In the same way musicians do with sound, or sculptors do with clay, or dancers do with their bodies. But while some painters find portraits beautiful, and some poets find rhyme beautiful, other painters choose abstract forms, or surrealistic settings, or impressionistic areas of color, just as some poets use carefully chosen, non-rhyming words to
