‘Verse’ is not the same as ‘poetry’. We say that a text is ‘verse’ when it is divided into lines. But in contrast, calling a text ‘poetry’ is a way of valuing it, saying that it offers something experientially special. Prose poems have these poetic qualities but are not divided into lines: they are poetry but not verse. On the other hand, a shopping list is divided into lines like verse, but it lacks the ‘poetic’ qualities of formal richness, complex and difficult meaning, and creativity and inspiration. In this article I ask why there is nevertheless a strong association between being verse and being poetry: why should division into lines correlate with the various valued characteristics which we associate with poetry?¹

Verse is a kind of text which is divided into lines; sometimes verse is metrical and sometimes it is not. The units of language include sounds, syllables, morphemes, words, phrases, sentences, and so on, but not lines.² Lines can coincide with units of language: a word is rarely split across a line boundary, phrases are usually split across line boundaries in specific ways, or a line may correspond to a sentence. But lines are not themselves units of language and instead are a mode of organisation added to language. Linguistic theory explains how units of language are formed, but cannot explain how lines are formed. Thus the question of where lines come from - how texts are divided into lines - is a problem. It ...