Western tradition
Classical thinkers employed classification as a way to define and assess the quality of poetry. Notable the existing fragment of Aristotle's poetics describes three genres of poetry the epic, the comic,
and the tragic and develop rules to distinguish the highest-quality poetry in each genre, based on the underlying purposes of a genre. Later aestheticians identified three major genres: epic poetry, lyric poetry, and dramatic poetry treating comedy and tragedy as subgenres of dramatic poetry.
Aristotle's work was influential throughout the Middle East during the Islamic golden age, as well as in Europe during the Renaissance. Later poets and aestheticians often distinguished poetry from and defined it in opposition to prose, which was generally understood as writing with a proclivity to logical explication and a linear narrative structure.
This does not imply that poetry is illogical or lacks narration, but rather that poetry is an attempt to render the beautiful or sublime without the burden of engaging the logical or narrative thought process. English Romantic poet Keats termed this escape from logic, "Negative Capability".
This "romantic" approach views form a key element of successful poetry because a form is abstract from the underlying notional logic. This approach remained influential in the twentieth century.
During this period there was also substantially more interaction among the various poetic tradition, in part due to the spread of European colonialism and the attendant rise in global trade. In addition to a boom in translation during the romantic period, numerous ancient works were rediscovered.
20th- century disputes
Some 20th-century literary theorists, relying less on the opposition of prose and poetry, focused on the poet as simply one who creates using language and poetry as what the poet creates.
The underlying concept of the poet as creator is not uncommon, and some modernist poets essentially do not distinguish between the creation of the poem with words and creative acts in order media such as carpentry.
Yet other modernists challenge the very attempt to define poetry as misguided, as when Archibald MacLeish concludes his paradoxical poem, " Ars Poetica ", with the lines " A poem should not mean/but be."
The dispute over the definition of poetry, and over poetry's distinction from other genres of literature, have been inextricably intertwined with the debate over the role of poetic form. The rejection of traditional forms and structure for poetry that began in the first half of the twentieth century coincided with a questioning of the purpose and meaning of traditional definitions of poetry and distinctions between poetry and prose, particularly given example of poetic prose and prosaic poetry.
Numerous modernist poets have written in non-traditional forms or in what traditionally would have been considered prose although their writing was generally infused with poetic diction and often with rhythm and tone established by non-metrical means.
While there was a substantial formalist reaction within the modernist schools to the breakdown of structure, this reaction focused as much on the development of new formal structures and synthesis as on the revival of older forms and structures.
More recently postmodernism has fully embraced MacLeish's concept and come to regard the boundaries between prose and poetry, and also among genres of poetry as having meaning only as cultural artefacts postmodernism goes beyond modernism's emphasis on the creative role of the poet,
to emphasize the role of the reader of a text (Hermeneutics), and to highlight the complex cultural web within which a poem is read. Today throughout the world, poetry often incorporate poetic form and diction from other cultures and from the past, further confounding attempts at definition and classification that were once sensible within a tradition such as the western canon.
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