I.
Read the two texts below and decide which of them is poetry and which is not.
Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months. Now that everything had returned to normal, he was surprised that there had been no obvious beginning, no point beyond which their lives had moved into a clearly more sinister dimension. With its forty floors and thousand apartments, its supermarket and swimming-pools, bank and junior school – all in effect abandoned in the sky – the high-rise offered more than enough opportunities for violence and confrontation…
II.
It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea, that a maiden there lived whom you may know by the name of Annabel Lee and this maiden she lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by me. She was a child and I was a child in this kingdom by the sea, but we loved with a love that was more than love I and my Annabel Lee – with a love that winged seraphs of heaven coveted her and me. And this was the reason that, long ago, in this kingdom by the sea, a wind blew out of a cloud by night chilling my Annabel Lee; so that her highborn kinsmen came and bore her away from me, to shut her up in a sepulcher in this kingdom by the sea…
Now, once you decided which excerpt actually is poetry, rewrite it in a verse form (like a poem). Try to point out to literary conventions in the text which are characteristic for poetry and which made you choose this excerpt. (Work in pairs if you want).

Handout Figurative language ( from J.A. Cuddon The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory )
Figurative language language which uses figures of speech; for example, metaphor, simile, alliteration. Figurative language must be distinguished from literal language. ‘He hared down the street’ or ‘He ran like a hare down the street’ are figurative (metaphor and simile). ‘He ran very quickly down the street’ is literal.
Poetic diction – diction denotes the vocabulary used by a writer. Poetic diction usually refers to a particular kind of language and artificial arrangement employed by many poets in a given epoch – such a language must be selected and adapted according to its appropriateness for the work in hand; it depends on literary convention.
Tone – the reflection of the speaking I’s attitude (especially towards his readers), manner, mood and moral outlook in his work; even, perhaps, the way is personality pervades the work.
The counterpart of tone of voice in speech, which may be friendly, detached, pompous, officious, intimate, bantering and so forth.
Metonymy – a figure of speech in which the name of an attribute or a thing is substituted for the thing itself. Common examples are ‘The Stage’ for the theatrical profession or ‘Dante’ for his works, like in the sentence ‘We often read Dante at school’.
Synecdoche – a figure in which the part stands for the whole, and thus something else is understood within the thing mentioned. For example: ‘Give us this day our daily bread’,
‘bread’ stands for all the meals taken each day.
Simile – a figure of speech in which one thing is likened to another, in such a way as to clarify and enhance an image; an explicit comparison, recognizable by the use of the words
‘like’ or ‘as’. For example: “She screamed like the one bereft of reason’.
Hyperbole – a figure of speech which contains an exaggeration for emphasis. For example; ‘I haven’t seen you for ages’; ‘as old as hills’; ‘terrible weather’.
Imagery
– the use of language to represent objects, actions, feelings, thoughts, ideas etc., in general to create images – mental pictures, which may be literal (no figures of speech), conceptual ( abstract imagery - figures of speech appealing to intellect like in a phrase ‘castle of God’ which is understood but impossible to visualize) and perceptual [appealing to senses: visual (eyes), olfactory (smell), tactile (touch), auditory (hearing), gustatory (taste) etc.]
Rhetorical figures – artful arrangements of words to achieve a particular emphasis and effect; a rhetorical figure does not alter the meanings of words (contradictory to for example metaphor). Best known rhetorical figures are: rhetorical question (not expecting any answer, self-evident, used for artistic effect); rhetorical irony (the attitude and tone of the speaking I is the exact opposite to what is expressed), alliteration (in which consonants at the beginnings of stressed syllables are repeated); assonance (repetition of similar vowel sounds, usually close together); consonance (the close repetition of identical consonant sons before and after different vowels); onomatopoeia (the formation and use of words to imitate sounds, the sound reflects the sense); anaphora (the repetition of a word or a group of words in successive clauses , usually in the beginning of each verse of a poem); apostrophe (in which a thing, a place, an abstract quality, an idea, a dead or abstract person, is addressed as if present and capable of understanding).