section_path: Types/Poetry
section_name: Poetry
paragraph_text: Poetry
  
  Poetry has traditionally been distinguished from prose by its greater use of the aesthetic qualities of language, including musical devices such as assonance, alliteration, rhyme, and rhythm, and by being set in lines and verses rather than paragraphs, and more recently its use of other typographical elements. This distinction is complicated by various hybrid forms such as digital poetry, sound poetry, concrete poetry and prose poem, and more generally by the fact that prose possesses rhythm. Abram Lipsky refers to it as an "open secret" that "prose is not distinguished from poetry by lack of rhythm".
  
  Prior to the 19th century, poetry was commonly understood to be something set in metrical lines: "any kind of subject consisting of Rhythm or Verses". Possibly as a result of Aristotle 's influence (his Poetics), "poetry" before the 19th century was usually less a technical designation for verse than a normative category of fictive or rhetorical art. As a form it may pre-date literacy, with the earliest works being composed within and sustained by an oral tradition; hence it constitutes the earliest example of literature.