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Poetry is written, spoken or sung language that is used in stronger or more original ways than prose is used. Poetry uses the meanings of words as prose does; but it also uses the sounds of words as if they were music, especially rhymes, other repeating sounds, and rhythms (beats or meters).

Poetry arranges words and groups of words to make repetitions and parallelisms. Poetry uses figures of speech, ellipses and delayed identification to suggest that there is more meaning in the language.