Poetry argument ends in murder

One poetry lover is accused of taking the art form so seriously that he stabbed and killed a man who dared to suggest it was inferior to prose.

A 53-year-old man has been charged with murdering his 67-year-old friend at the climax of a drunken argument in the Sverdlovsk region of Russia, reports BBC News.

The two were drinking spirits at the 67-year-old's apartment on January 20 when the older man reportedly said only prose is "real literature".

The other man, a schoolteacher, was so offended by this affront to poetry that he allegedly stabbed his friend to death and then fled.

He reportedly confessed his crime to police when they found him hiding at an acquaintance's house in a nearby village.

The murdered man, who led an "anti-social lifestyle and abused spirits", had had pieces of his prose published in a local newspaper.

Those who engage in intellectual arguments should be aware of the potentially deadly consequences: in January 2014 a man was killed over a game of chess in Ireland, while a Russian man shot another man in a dispute about the philosopher Immanuel Kant in September 2013.