Suck It, Prose: Why Poetry is Superior

Prose is powerful. It's something we have all written one time or another. It's gorgeous. It's creative. It's imaginative.

But it isn't poetry.

Poetry isn't something everyone can successfully write (not that anyone can write prose, but far more people can). According to many writers, poetry is the highest and hardest literary genre.

With good reason.

Meters, lines, stanzas, similes, onomatopoeia, rhymes, and all the other poetry techniques are what makes poetry so gosh darned complicated. But also the best.

With poetry, we aren't just writing a story with emotion. We are writing in emotion. We are writing in passion.

You see, poetry isn't a lot of things. It isn't straight-forward (most of the time), it isn't flat, and it isn't easy.

Flat? Yeah, flat. As in boring. As in no sense of emotion. As in no sense of story or meaning.

Poetry is anything but flat. Actually, with some poems you are able to read it three or four times and each time come to a new conclusion on what the poem is about and the metaphorical meaning behind it. That is far from "flat."

Of course, perhaps the comparison is a bit unfair. There are way too many types of poems (55 at my current count) to even compare. That's because you can write a haiku and an idyll about the very same subject with the very same story. You can't do that with prose. Sure, you can shorten a prose and take out some meat, but it will change the story and most likely won't be as good.

Poetry is entirely a different beast. With the many available forms and elements, the obvious answer of which literature genre is superior shouldn't even be a question. It's laughable to even suggest prose.