Carol and Tim:
Of course poetry and prose are more or less arbitrary divisions of a continuum, but that's not much of an answer because, in fact, one does "feel" a difference. For my money it's the degree of troping or, better yet, turning. Turning can happen in at least three dimensions: Literal language turning figurative, indicative language turning into sound, and any language turning back on itself and becoming self-referential. No doubt there are more. Our very word "verse" has an old connection to the idea of turning, and one of the things I look for in a poem is what happens at the ends of lines: does the language turn in some interesting, maybe unexpected way, or does it just go on across the break? Sure, prose can do these things (except for interesting turns at the line breaks), so it's a matter of density and, in some cases, what the writer and reader agree to call it.
Richard
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