Christmas poetry

I received a Christmas poem from a friend today, and it was beautiful but it didn't rhyme.

I beg the question to call it poetry; my other poet friend David says that if it doesn't rhyme it's not a poem. I remember getting him upset once by commenting that a good essay is an extended poem. (I was just repeating something I had heard from a neighbor of mine.)

I recently learned that C.S. Lewis is of the same opinion as David:

"I'm sick of our Abracadabrist poets. What gives the show away is that their professed admirers give quite contradictory interpretations of the same poem. I'm prepared to believe that an unintelligible picture is really a very good horse if all its admirers tell me so; but when one says it's a horse, and the next that its' a ship, and the third that it's an orange, and the fourth that it's Mt. Everest, I give it up" (Letters to an American Lady).

Elsewhere: "I thought the poem by that woman was very good Christianity, but not a very good poem: no rhythmic vitality, no reason why the lines should end where they do, and no vocalic melody. But then I'm old fashioned. I think vers libre succeeds only in a few exceptional poems, and its prevalence has really ruined the art" (ibid.)

The interesting thing is that when I found out Lewis felt this way about free verse, I was more inclined to believe it than when only my friend David said it. I wonder why.

Either this shows that (a) I can't think for myself; or (b) the whole question has tapped into deep dilemmas in my soul on the order of whether God plays dice with the universe; or, (c) the various "facts" we all think we know are opinions we accept based on the perceived credibility of authority. This latter, I suppose, is why writers constantly quote other writers --- to say no more than what they themselves wanted to say.

May your Christmas be full of poetry, rhymed or otherwise.