Here is how the OED defines verse and poetry:

Verse: “(a) A succession of words arranged according to natural or recognized rules of prosody and forming a complete metrical line; one of the lines of a poem or piece of versification.”

Poetry: “a. Composition in verse or some comparable patterned arrangement of language in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of distinctive style and rhythm; the art of such a composition.”

Is there a difference? Are these terms interchangeable? The OED suggests that poetry is made up of verse (“or some comparable patterned arrangement”), but that poetry has an intensity of expression that is not necessary to verse.

John Hollander, the poet and scholar who has written the handbook on meter and form that we will be using opens his discussion as follows: “This is a guide to verse, to the formal structures which are a necessary condition of poetry, but not a sufficient one.”

Paul Fussell in his masterful Poetic Meter and Poetic Form tackles this from a different direction:

When Boswell asked Johnson, “What is poetry?” Johnson answered: “Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.” In the same way, everyone knows what meter is, but it is not easy to tell what it is. The first thing to say is that we know almost nothing about it, especially about how much of it is “in” the pattern of written words before us and how much “in” the reader’s mind and musculature.

The definition of verse, how it works and contributes to poetry, and the ways that readers add to its effectiveness through their own reading: these are some of the issues of this course.