What Makes a Text to be a Poem

With this question I do not imply the distinction between true poem and false poem, for I don’t believe in it, but rather, what properties must have a text to be identified as a poem? It is a subject that I have entertained for long and I would like to open a debate giving some possible answers.

Traditionally, it was meter and rhyme, or, in a broader sense, formal properties of sound the reference frame for our qualification. Archaic poetry was still linked to the constraints of memory of oral tradition, and formal properties gave an easy and understandable protocol. Such a categorization opens up a clear understanding of early poetry, its connexion with shaman incantations and magic, long before writing, in the world of the myths of anima mundi. But the question became a bit more entangled when philosophy entered the scene. The philosophical poems of Parmenides, Empedocles, and other presocratics had the formal properties of sound of, say, Homer, or Ibicus, but the subject matter was so different that it was rather arbitrary to assign them to a same genre.

    But is there an specific content which we can call poetic? I have identified the beginnings of an inner realm of expression in Egypt and Mesopotamia derived from the recitation of the ritual texts which ended up giving the core of an emotional dimension generally accepted and identified as poetic. I call this the lyrical citizen, and as I have analyzed it somewhere else, is related to the extensions of the idea of immortality to all citizens at large which begun in Egypt after XVI B.C. as a narrative creation of the Priests of Osiris. The realm of the lyrical citizen is constituted by the difference between his/her social persona (the persona linked to a specific economic activity) and a narrative transcendental persona which he or she considers to give a deeper form of identity. The lyrical citizen is the lyrical I, which is independent of the economic action, a persona invested with all the properties created by immortality myths.

    We then have the formal properties of sound and the realm of the lyrical citizen that put together would give a criterion to answer our question. Modern poetry, like modern music, changed the sound properties very dramatically extending the rhythmic, harmonic and formal realms far beyond tradition, so we should, of course, consider formal properties of sound in this extended sense. Even the realm of the lyrical citizen has been extended to encompass a vast world of emotions which, although rooted in them, not necessarily follow the transcendental patterns established by old poetry.

Nonetheless, we could find examples of prose works which could defy such a simple characterization. Lezama Lima’s Paradiso is a clear example, among others of an extended list. A third criterion could be added which modifies both the two aforementioned giving an hypothetical  continuum of literary works: the semantic density of the images. Ceteris paribus, we tend to consider more poetic a text that builds a denser web of semantic relations.