I pretty much agree with Sam. I hope I was clear enough in my post to make it clear that I don't totally agree with Lew.
I think saying "verse" means "metered" works well as long as "metered" is understood to be a broad concept. Beyond accents, syllables, and stresses, it can mean any way in which a poet measures lines -- this can be subjective, as Sam says, or according to more or less carefully thought out systems of, say, breath lengths, phrase lengths, units of content, syntactic units, typographical intervals, etc.
"Free verse," as someone as knowledgeable about the history of poetry as Lew should know, does not mean "free of verse" but "verse that is free" -- free of certain assumptions and rules about meter, structure, and usage, not necessarily free of "verse" itself. It has always struck me as odd that Lew doesn't see this distinction, that he is so arbitrary about what he counts as "metered," and that so many of practitioners free verse don't seem to understand the distinction either.
Anyway, I agree that lineation is the key, but really only because lineation is the evidence of some sort of meter, be it rigorous, subjective, or otherwise. A line of prose goes on forever until it hits the physical limitations of its media (i.e. -- the margins of a page). A line of verse goes until it reaches its measured limit, however that is defined. Or something like that.
In any case, none of this helps answer the question up top, which is what makes poetry poetic. An essay, story, novel, epic, play, or poem could be written in prose or verse. What makes us decide that The Iliad, Hamlet, Mending Wall, and De Rerum Natura are all in fact "poetry?" That seems to me to be a much more slippery question.
David R.
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