Whether rap should be considered poetry has been an ongoing debate in the literary world for years. People who believe that it should be considered poetry argue that rap has rhythm and rhyme and is filled with emotion, while people who argue against it say that rap is a bunch of meaningless mumbo jumbo, but before we jump into the question of whether rap is poetry, let us ask the question, what is poetry? A poem could be long or short, profound or silly, metaphorical or literal. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines poetry as “writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm”. Because poetry comes in many different styles and forms, I believe that rap should be considered poetry. The first reason why rap is poetry that it utilizes rhythm and rhyme. Both rhythm and rhyme are defining aspects of poetry. Rhythm in poetry is created by a metric pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, …show more content…
To counter the argument that the violent and explicit topics of some rap lyrics make rap not poetry, there are a plethora of different ways to write poetry. Rap fits into poetry because poetry is fluid. It can be written about any subject in a wide range of styles and forms. The “ugly” or “pretty” nature of a poem does not dictate whether it is poetry; there are other factors involved, such as rhythm and rhyme as mentioned earlier. Elizabeth J. Pyatt, a former linguistics Ph.D., points out that not all poetry is “pretty”. She states that “epic poems like The Iliad and the Táin (Ireland) could be damn blood thirsty at times” and that “if you think rap is lewd… you haven’t seen Middle Welsh ‘erotic’ poetry”. Pyatt’s examples help illustrate that violent and crude language is not ruled out in