For me, one example of a "good" poem is Robert Frost's Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening: Whose woods these are I think I know / His house is in the vil

For me, one example of a "good" poem is Robert Frost's Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening: Whose woods these are I think I know / His house is in the village though / He will not see me stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow. I'm of the opinion that poetry's a legitimate art form only when there's strong rhyme and meter. Frost had to work to solve a complicated constraint satisfaction problem: Low-level constraints of syllable counts, stresses, and the sounds at the end of the lines -- combined with higher-level semantic constraints -- the words form grammatically correct sentences that tell an interesting story. All the examples he gives -- Shakespeare, Pope, Milton, William Carlos Williams, and some poet from the 1980's I never heard of (Ashbery). (I'll admit Shakespeare has rhythm, but his poems don't rhyme very well. I can't even begin to analyze all the things wrong with Shakespeare and Pope and such, because their language is so old-timey that I can barely understand them.) Calling such works "poetry" is pretentious BS, in my opinion. To me, the label of poetry needs to be earned. The poet has to pose and solve a constraint satisfaction problem. As a reader, if you're reading poetry, it means you're getting that primal satisfying linguistic sensation when one part of your brain admires the constraint satisfaction problem and its solution, while another part of your brain appreciates the story it's telling. Often if a bad writer writes prose, people feel free to call them out on it. If a bad writer writes poetry, people hesitate to offer harsh criticism, because they feel like criticizing poetry just makes them an uncultured Philistine. So essentially, with good poetry, the author does a bunch of constraint satisfaction problems, and the reader's brain gets tickled in a unique way. With bad poetry, the author just writes prose, insists the line breaks go in specific places, and says "Yeah this is poetry" because they're an arrogant jerk, and their audience just sort of goes along with it. TLDR: "How is this poetry? It doesn't even rhyme. It's prose, and it sucks" is a perfectly sensible criticism of a huge amount of poetry. But this is regarded as a hopelessly uncultured and anti-intellectual sentiment in pretentious literary circles, which leads to its further proliferation.