I sent a post this morning to the Poetryetc. discussion list, in which I said that what distinguishes poetry from prose, basically, is that in poetry language becomes an event, whereas prose language points toward another event. Poetry heightens language, prose subdues it, makes it transparent. The relationship is subtle and symbiotic, not black & white.

Does this heightening have a telos or goal or meaning beyond itself? One such goal, anyway, is to bring both the poet and the audience or reader into the "presence" (in both senses) of the event. Whitman: "this is no book, but a man". One of the elements of Mandelstam's Acmeism was the somewhat Nietszchean idea of the simultaneity-return of past poetry - "I want the living breathing Ovid," he wrote (or something to that effect).