Does a poem actually need to rhyme to be considered real poetry?

[DarkMatter24]

Few arguments in poetry circles get more heated than the question of whether rhyme is actually a requirement for a piece of writing to count as genuine poetry, or whether that idea is simply an outdated hangover from an earlier era of the art form. Traditional forms like the sonnet, the villanelle and the limerick all rely heavily on structured rhyme schemes, and for centuries rhyme was treated as one of the defining features separating poetry from ordinary prose, a technical challenge that forced poets to find genuinely inventive ways of expressing an idea within a constrained sound pattern.

Free verse, by contrast, abandoned that requirement almost entirely, with poets like Walt Whitman helping pioneer an approach built instead around rhythm, line breaks and imagery rather than end rhyme, an approach that has come to dominate a huge amount of celebrated modern and contemporary poetry, from Pulitzer Prize winning collections to the kind of spoken word pieces that regularly go viral online today.

Defenders of rhyme argue that the discipline it imposes actually produces sharper, more memorable writing, forcing poets to work harder for their images rather than settling for the first phrase that comes to mind, while defenders of free verse argue that rhyme can just as easily become a crutch, forcing poets into awkward word choices purely to hit a sound rather than serve the actual meaning of the poem. Where do you personally land on this one?