Noah Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language

1. (n.) A metrical composition; a composition in verse written in certain measures, whether in blank verse or in rhyme, and characterized by imagination and poetic diction; -- contradistinguished from prose; as, the poems of Homer or of Milton.

2. (n.) A composition, not in verse, of which the language is highly imaginative or impassioned; as, a prose poem; the poems of Ossian.