Is photography poetry or prose?

Reflect 2, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Quote from H. L. Mencken:

Poetry can never be concocted by any purely intellectual process. It has nothing to do with the intellect: it is, in fact, a violent and irreconcilable enemy of the intellect. Its purpose is not to establish facts, but to evade or deny them. What it essays to do is to make life more bearable in an intolerable world by concealing and obliterating all the harsher realities. Its message is that all will be well tomorrow, or, at the latest, next Tuesday: that the grave is not cold and damp but steam-heated and lined with roses; that a girl is not a viviparous mammal, full of pathogenic organisms and enlightened self-interest, but an angel with bobbed wings and a heart of gold.

I have a feeling that most photography attempts to do what Mencken wrote about poetry. In his opinion, poetry was much below prose as an art form. (A bit surprising as Mencken was a great lover of music.)

Is there any prose in photography, or is it all just poetry, that is: lying about the realities of life. Is the situation in photography like it is with poetry: it you try to include intellect in the process, art dies.