What is poetry?

Is this what poetry is?

• "For every year, that you age For every year, that you change The memory of your life Warms our hearts day and night" Is that an example of a poem? I just wrote that off the top of my head.

• Answer:

  It certainly is a poem. It might not be a very good poem - after all you did just write it off the top of your head - but it is a poem nonetheless. There is no rule stating a poem must be labored over for hours and hours and months and months; that kind of commitment might make a good poem, but then you were not asking if what you had written was a good poem. Any attempted definition of poem, which is essentially what you were asking, is going to be contentious. But, what you have written does use some fundamental poetic techniques: parallelism; rhyme; typography; point of view; narratorial persona; imagery; metaphor; moralistic consideration. Yet, again it does not do these things well, that would take some time and effort, but it does still do them. I think as a very basic and even tongue-in-cheek definition you cannot go wrong with Terry Eagleton's (possibly the greatest literary critic alive today) definition of poetry in How to Read a Poem: 'A poem is a piece of imaginative writing where the writer decides where the lines end'. You have certainly decided where the lines end.