Prose uses the medium of language whilst poetry serves language and explores it. - Michael Schmidt

What matters in poetry is form, how words work together, the sounds and silences their combinations make. The ordered effects they produce on the attentive hearer.

Prose and poetry are different in construction. You can lie back and read prose, and you can read it fast. Poetry on the other hand, requires a different kind of attention and concentration … the effect it has on the ear and the imagination.

In poetry much of the sense and most of the pleasure resides in the sounds the poem make.