Part I: The Craft of Biblical Poetry

Prose and poetry form traditional categories of literature. Visually prose goes all the way from one side of the page to the other, while poetry turns back before reaching the far side. Prose has the freedom to be long or short as seems good. Traditionally, some restraint has defined poetry. Until Walt Whitman’s free verse, English poetry required the hallmarks of rhyme and strict meter. Hebrew poetry has a different hallmark: parallelism.