is poetry a popular genre essay

Poetry is more popular than ever – but not all poets are happy about it

Lecturer in English and Creative Industries, University of York

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JT Welsch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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The joke among poets is that it’s never a good thing when poetry makes the news. From plagiarism scandals to prize controversies , casual readers would be forgiven for thinking the so-called “poetry world” exists in a state of perpetual outrage. In a recent article, The Guardian reported that an essay published in the magazine PN Review “has split the poetry establishment”.

Rebecca Watts’ contentious essay , The Cult of the Noble Amateur, first appeared in the magazine’s print edition in December. In it, she laments social media’s “dumbing effect” on recent poetry, and a “rejection of craft” that is fuelling the success of what she calls “personality poets”. In particular, Watts criticises Rupi Kaur, whose bestselling verse initially found an audience on Instagram, and Hollie McNish and Kate Tempest, whose performances have garnered millions of YouTube views.

To some extent, the only surprise in this latest debate is the wider media interest. Within days, what might have passed like so many online squabbles had prompted further coverage in The Guardian and Bookseller , a segment on Radio 4’s World at One , and an interview with Watts herself on BBC’s Front Row . It’s with no small irony, of course, that the essay’s viral spread came only after it was posted on PN Review’s website , then shared on Facebook and Twitter.

But by focusing on the false opposition of quality and popularity, both sides have been reluctant to see the debate itself as a symptom of the media’s growing interest in the art form. As Watts’ essay admits, poetry is more popular than ever. And over the past few years, news of scandals has increasingly been replaced by celebrations of its renewed relevance.

Within days of the 2016 US presidential election, for instance, the LA Times , CNN , Buzzfeed , Vox and dozens of other outlets were offering what The Guardian called “poems to counter the election fallout”. The Atlantic declared “Still, Poetry Will Rise”, and Wired warned : “Don’t Look Now, But 2016 is Resurrecting Poetry.”

The political impetus for poetry’s media “resurrection” has also fed into a more general sense of its coolness. In the same week that inspired so many election poems, “London’s new generation of poets” were seen “ storming the catwalks of Fashion Week”. Meanwhile, Teen Vogue offered a slideshow of young poets who “are actually making the genre cool again” and a Guardian columnist who has written in the past about coconut water trends assured us that poetry is now “ the coolest thing ”.

For some, this visibility might seem to justify Watts’ worry that poetry like Kaur’s (which featured among The Guardian’s “coolest things”) has become a form of “consumer driven content”. Like some jazz or comic book devotees, certain poetry lovers remain uncomfortable with its widening fanbase. Indeed, in his mapping of the cultural field, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu suggested that poetry’s economic priorities are “reversed”, and that relative obscurity has long been part of its caché.

Desperate to preserve that, perhaps, Watts begins her attack by suggesting that poetry’s “highest ever” sales over the past two years are to blame for declining standards. But she’s not the only one to bristle at poetry’s growing currency, or to assume it proves that “artless poetry sells”.

After Patricia Lockwood’s Rape Joke went viral in 2013, Adam Plunkett, writing for the New Yorker, sneered at her “crowd-pleasing poetry” for its appeal to the “lowest common denominator” online. A similar cycle of praise and censure was repeated last month, when Kristen Roupenian’s short story Cat Person earned a seven-figure book-deal after going viral in the New Yorker itself.

Celebrities trying their hand at verse have been another easy target for the preservationists. The Independent declared that Kristen Stewart had written the “worst poem of all time”, after her piece appeared in Marie Claire in 2014. And in November 2016, Cosmopolitan called on Harvard professor Stephanie Burt to explain why the poems included in Taylor Swift’s new album didn’t really work for her as poems.

Yet, beyond poetry’s appearances at Fashion Week or in financial adverts , there are signs that hang ups over its popular appeal are losing their grip. Beyoncé’s use of Warsan Shire ’s work in 2016’s Lemonade , for example, was met with few claims that it was dumbing anything down. Just as tellingly, the week that saw such heated battles over the PN Review essay also saw the singer Halsey’s moving Women’s March poem go viral to unanimous praise . And there was hardly a peep from the “poetry world”.

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I. What is Poetry?

Poetry is a type of literature based on the interplay of words and rhythm. It often employs rhyme and meter (a set of rules governing the number and arrangement of syllables in each line). In poetry, words are strung together to form sounds, images, and ideas that might be too complex or abstract to describe directly.

Poetry was once written according to fairly strict rules of meter and rhyme, and each culture had its own rules. For example, Anglo-Saxon poets had their own rhyme schemes and meters, while Greek poets and Arabic poets had others. Although these classical forms are still widely used today, modern poets frequently do away with rules altogether – their poems generally do not rhyme, and do not fit any particular meter. These poems, however, still have a rhythmic quality and seek to create beauty through their words.

The opposite of poetry is “prose” – that is, normal text that runs without line breaks or rhythm. This article, for example, is written in prose.

II. Examples and Explanation

Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth,

nothing is bred that is weaker than man.

(Homer, The Odyssey)

The Greek poet Homer wrote some of the ancient world’s most famous literature. He wrote in a style called epic poetry , which deals with gods, heroes, monsters, and other large-scale “epic” themes . Homer’s long poems tell stories of Greek heroes like Achilles and Odysseus, and have inspired countless generations of poets, novelists, and philosophers alike.

Poetry gives powerful insight into the cultures that create it. Because of this, fantasy and science fiction authors often create poetry for their invented cultures. J.R.R. Tolkien famously wrote different kinds of poetry for elves, dwarves, hobbits, and humans, and the rhythms and subject matter of their poetry was supposed to show how these races differed from one another. In a more humorous vein, many Star Trek fans have taken to writing love poetry in the invented Klingon language.

III. The Importance of Poetry

Poetry is probably the oldest form of literature, and probably predates the origin of writing itself. The oldest written manuscripts we have are poems, mostly epic poems telling the stories of ancient mythology. Examples include the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Vedas (sacred texts of Hinduism). This style of writing may have developed to help people memorize long chains of information in the days before writing. Rhythm and rhyme can make the text more memorable, and thus easier to preserve for cultures that do not have a written language.

Poetry can be written with all the same purposes as any other kind of literature – beauty, humor, storytelling, political messages, etc.

IV. Examples in of Poetry Literature

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); I think that I shall never see  –> A a poem lovely as a tree… –> A poems are made by fools like me, –> B but only God can make a tree. –> B (Joyce Kilmer, Trees )

This is an excerpt from Joyce Kilmer’s famous short poem. The poem employs a fairly standard rhyme scheme (AABB, lines 1 and 2 rhymes together and lines 3 and 4 rhymes together), and a meter called “iambic tetrameter,” which is commonly employed in children’s rhymes.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking… (Alan Ginsberg, Howl)

These are the first few lines of Howl , one of the most famous examples of modern “free verse” poetry. It has no rhyme, and no particular meter. But its words still have a distinct, rhythmic quality, and the line breaks encapsulate the meaning of the poem. Notice how the last word of each line contributes to the imagery of a corrupt, ravaged city (“madness, naked, smoking”), with one exception: “heavenly.” This powerful juxtaposition goes to the heart of Ginsburg’s intent in writing the poem – though what that intent is, you’ll have to decide for yourself.

In the twilight rain, these brilliant-hued hibiscus – A lovely sunset

This poem by the Japanese poet Basho is a haiku . This highly influential Japanese style has no rhymes, but it does have a very specific meter – five syllables in the first line, seven in the second line, and five in the third line.

V. Examples of Poetry in Popular Culture

Rapping originated as a kind of performance poetry. In the 1960s and 70s, spoken word artists like Gil Scott-Heron began performing their poems over live or synthesized drumbeats, a practice that sparked all of modern hip hop. Even earlier, the beat poets of the 1950s sometimes employed drums in their readings.

Some of the most famous historical poems have been turned into movies or inspired episodes of television shows. Beowulf , for example, is an Anglo-Saxon epic poem that has spawned at least 8 film adaptations, most recently a 2007 animated film starring Angelina Jolie and Anthony Hopkins. Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven has also inspired many pop culture spinoffs with its famous line, “Nevermore.”

VI. Related Terms (with examples)

Nearly all poems are written in verse – that is, they have line breaks and meter (rhythm). But verse is also used in other areas of literature. For example, Shakespeare’s characters often speak in verse. Their dialogue is separated into rhythmic lines just like a song, but they are supposed to be speaking normally.

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1.6: The Poetry Genre

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Poetry is a form of literary art that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, prosaic ostensible meaning (ordinary intended meaning). Poetry has traditionally been distinguished from prose by its being set in verse. Additionally, prose is cast in sentences while poetry is in lines, and the syntax of prose is dictated by meaning, whereas that of poetry is held across meter or the visual aspects of the poem.

While poetry sometimes rhymes, it does not always. It is the rhythmic pattern of words that sets it apart from the natural speech of the other genres. However, poems also place particular emphasis on figurative language, symbolism, and abstractions. This is often the characteristic that either draws fans to poetry or deters those from wanting to study it. Meaning is often indirect in a poem, putting much responsibility on the reader to analyze and decipher the various nuances of feeling and meaning with it.

One way to better understand poetry is by analyzing the elements that make up a good poem. Poems are written in either closed or open form. Closed form poems are written in specific patterns, using meter, line length, and line groupings called stanzas. Open form poems, often still referred to as "free verse" poems, do not use regular rhythmic patterns (i.e., metric feet), are usually unrhymed, have varying line lengths, and have no set line groupings. As you analyze a poem for an oral interpretation performance, remember that you are looking for relationships between the formal devices of poetry, like word choice, metric pattern, metaphor, and the poem's subject. A thorough investigation of the elements of a poem helps you to better understand the poem.

Analyzing Poetry

Muriel Rukeyser says in The Life of Poetry that to successfully read a poem, we must give a poem “a total response.” This means giving it all our attention, taking it in slowly, reading it several times. It means listening to the poem openly, without judgment, and without projecting our own assumed meanings onto it. Instead, Rukeyser writes, it means coming “to the emotional meanings at every moment.” As she explains, “That is one reason for the high concentration of music, in poetry.”

To come to emotional meanings at every moment means to adjust and react to the way a poem takes shape with every word, every line, every sentence, every stanza. Each poem creates its own universe as it moves from line to line. It is a universe that Rukeyser describes as the “universe of emotional truth.” So how exactly does one listen with his or her emotions?

Reading creates an indirect, yet intimate, connection between reader and author. As readers, we take the author’s words—their breath—into ourselves. We shape the words with our own bodies and, too, give them life with our own breath. Reading poetry, we breathe in what a poet breathes out. We share breath. The words and their meanings become part of our body as they move through our mind, triggering sensations in our bodies that lead to thoughts. And through this process, we have experiences that are new and that change us as much as any other experience can.

Poetry is a condensed art form that produces an experience in a reader through words. And though words may appear visually as symbols on the page, the experience that poems produce in us is much more physical and direct. The elements of poetry permit a poet to control many aspects of language—tone, pace, rhythm, sound—as well as language’s effects: images, ideas, sensations. These elements give power to the poet to shape a reader’s physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual experience of the poem. Because form and function are so closely intertwined, it is impossible to paraphrase a poem. This is why we must read poems with full concentration and focus more than once. It is why we must read them out loud. It is why we must be attentive to every aspect of the poem on both ends: as a writer, and as a reader.

Readers come to the page with different backgrounds and a range of different experiences with poetry, but it is how we read a poem that determines our experience of it. “Reading” or even “analyzing” a poem may not be the best description of this process. Instead, one who plans to perform a poem must go through the actual process of “coming to” the poem, ingesting its lines, and responding emotionally.

Consider the following poem by Emily Dickinson:

I ’M nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know. How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!

Upon first read of this poem, one might conclude the speaker is thankful she is not popular and well known by others. However, after further analysis, it is possible that this speaker truly does wish to be part of the in-crowd. Perhaps she is trying to impress or identify with the person to whom she is speaking by saying these things while she secretly wishes to be one of the popular people. You can see how the interpretation one chooses for this poem would affect the way one would say the words, use pauses, and select appropriate facial expressions.

Performance of Poetry

Since poetry can vary in its levels of abstraction, some find it frustrating to read since meaning is often connotative and indirect. This can make it difficult to decide how to perform it an adequately assign meaning to its words with our delivery. However, an oral interpreter of poetry must thoroughly understand a poem to honor it properly and convey each nuance of its meaning and feeling. For example, a performer could not decide where the narrator should gaze if she hasn’t thought about to whom the narrator is speaking. If a performer has not considered the emotions or motivations behind the narrator’s words in a poem, he will not be able to use appropriate facial expressions, posture, or vocal inflection.

You may find the following considerations helpful as they provide characteristics to look for when analyzing poetry. You can use the answers to these prompts to help you make decisions on how to choose themes/messages to highlight in a performance. They will also help you make performance choices on how to use your voice and body to perform a poem for your audience:

Determine the Subject of the Poem

• Paraphrase/summarize the poem: what is it about?
• Does the poem address a social, psychological, historical, or mythical phenomenon?

Identify the Poem’s Narrator

• Who is speaking? Consider age, gender, occupation, and more.
• Under what circumstances? Identify the setting.

Identify the Narrator’s Audience

• To whom is the narrator speaking?
• Is the narrator speaking to him or herself? If not, is that audience in the same physical space as the narrator? Is the audience a single person, multiple people?

Note the Diction (Word Choice) of the Poet

• Be sure to look up all unfamiliar words in a dictionary.
• What are the words' denotations and connotations?
• Are the words concrete or abstract?

Determine the Tone of the Poem

• Is the poem serious? Ironic? Satiric? Contemplative? Ambiguous?
• Identify words that set the tone.
• Determine whether the tone changes within the poem.

Determine the Rhythmical Devices Used by the Poet

• What is the basic metrical pattern? Line length?
• What is the length of the stanza?
• What is the rhyme scheme? End rhyme? Internal rhyme?
• Does the poet employ any other metrical devices?
• What form does the poem take? Open or closed?

Note Your Emotional Response to the Poem

• How does the poem make you feel?
• How might you convey those emotions and feelings to an audience using your voice and body language?

Note the Use of Other Literary Devices

• What allusions (indirect references) does the poem contain?
• Listen to the sounds in the poem. Make note of characteristics such as assonance, alliteration, and onomatopoeia.
• Is there any figurative language such as metaphor, simile, symbolism, imagery, irony, personification, antithesis, hyperbole, metonymy, synecdoche, allegory, paradox, understatement, or overstatement?
• Note the use or absence of punctuation.
• Titles are important in poetry. What does the title say about the work?

Determine the Values of the Poem

• Does the poet succeed in recreating his experiences within the reader? How?
• Is the experience intensely felt by the reader?

Perhaps the most challenging part of performing poetry, particularly those poems that rhyme, is making it sound natural. When a performer gets caught up in overly emphasizing the rhyme of a piece, it can sound unnatural, mechanical, and it tends to detract from the meaning. To prevent this from happening, you might consider physically rewriting the poem, reflecting the natural pausing spots you would like to take during performance. For example, take a look at the original written format of a monologue delivered by King Henry V from William Shakespeare's play, Henry V :

Henry V , Act III, Scene I, by William Shakespeare (Appearing here as typed in the original Shakespearian work) Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our English dead! In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility, But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger: Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage, Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide, Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit To his full height. On, on, you noblest English, Dishonor not your mothers. Now attest That those whom you called fathers did beget you. Be copy now to men of grosser blood, And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman, Whose limbs were made in England, show us here The mettle of your pasture. Let us swear That you are worth your breeding, which I doubt not, For there is none of you so mean and base That hath not noble luster in your eyes. I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot. Follow your spirit, and upon this charge Cry “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”

Shakespeare, W., Kellogg, B., ed. (1883) Shakespeare's King Henry V . New York, Clark & Maynard. [Pdf] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/15016808/ .

The above is written in a rhythm known as iambic pentameter. A review of the poem reveals that the natural stopping point for some of the sentences/phrases don’t always land at the ends of the poems “lines.” For example, in the line “Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit To his full height,” the line ends visually after “spirit,” but the essence of the sentence’s meaning only shines when the phrasing is continued through the word “height.” So, a performer would likely want to take care not to pause between the words “spirit” and “To” but rather after the word “height.”

Therefore, when performing poetry, a performer might consider rewriting the poem structurally (without changing the words) to better reflect how it might look if the character spoke the words as natural speech:

Henry V , Act III, Scene I, by William Shakespeare (Appearing here in a re-typed/re-formatted version that reflects more natural phrasing) Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more -- or close the wall up with our English dead! In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility. But when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger: Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage, Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide. Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit to his full height. On, on, you noblest English, Dishonor not your mothers. Now attest that those whom you called fathers did beget you. Be copy now to men of grosser blood, and teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman, whose limbs were made in England, Show us here the mettle of your pasture. Let us swear that you are worth your breeding, which I doubt not, for there is none of you so mean and base that hath not noble luster in your eyes. I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, straining upon the start. The game’s afoot. Follow your spirit, and upon this charge cry “God for Harry, England, ….and Saint George!”

Note that the above, though it has the identical wording as the previous version, looks a bit more like a prose piece since the lines no longer seem to reveal an obvious rhythm/pattern. After analyzing a poem, consider rewriting it to reflect the phrasings and meanings more naturally. This may help you avoid falling into a sing-songy, unnatural delivery style and help your audience to understand the meaning of the poem more deeply.

Attributions

Adapted from https://human.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Humanities/Book%3A_Introduction_to_Humanities_(Larsen)/08%3A_New_Page , https://moodle.linnbenton.edu/course/view.php?id=4645 , https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/naming-the-unnameable/chapter/chapter-two-welcome-reader-reading-poetry/ .

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Writing about poetry can be one of the most demanding tasks that many students face in a literature class. Poetry, by its very nature, makes demands on a writer who attempts to analyze it that other forms of literature do not. So how can you write a clear, confident, well-supported essay about poetry? This handout offers answers to some common questions about writing about poetry.

What's the Point?

In order to write effectively about poetry, one needs a clear idea of what the point of writing about poetry is. When you are assigned an analytical essay about a poem in an English class, the goal of the assignment is usually to argue a specific thesis about the poem, using your analysis of specific elements in the poem and how those elements relate to each other to support your thesis.

So why would your teacher give you such an assignment? What are the benefits of learning to write analytic essays about poetry? Several important reasons suggest themselves:

• To help you learn to make a text-based argument. That is, to help you to defend ideas based on a text that is available to you and other readers. This sharpens your reasoning skills by forcing you to formulate an interpretation of something someone else has written and to support that interpretation by providing logically valid reasons why someone else who has read the poem should agree with your argument. This isn't a skill that is just important in academics, by the way. Lawyers, politicians, and journalists often find that they need to make use of similar skills.
• To help you to understand what you are reading more fully. Nothing causes a person to make an extra effort to understand difficult material like the task of writing about it. Also, writing has a way of helping you to see things that you may have otherwise missed simply by causing you to think about how to frame your own analysis.
• To help you enjoy poetry more! This may sound unlikely, but one of the real pleasures of poetry is the opportunity to wrestle with the text and co-create meaning with the author. When you put together a well-constructed analysis of the poem, you are not only showing that you understand what is there, you are also contributing to an ongoing conversation about the poem. If your reading is convincing enough, everyone who has read your essay will get a little more out of the poem because of your analysis.

What Should I Know about Writing about Poetry?

Most importantly, you should realize that a paper that you write about a poem or poems is an argument. Make sure that you have something specific that you want to say about the poem that you are discussing. This specific argument that you want to make about the poem will be your thesis. You will support this thesis by drawing examples and evidence from the poem itself. In order to make a credible argument about the poem, you will want to analyze how the poem works—what genre the poem fits into, what its themes are, and what poetic techniques and figures of speech are used.

What Can I Write About?

Theme: One place to start when writing about poetry is to look at any significant themes that emerge in the poetry. Does the poetry deal with themes related to love, death, war, or peace? What other themes show up in the poem? Are there particular historical events that are mentioned in the poem? What are the most important concepts that are addressed in the poem?

Genre: What kind of poem are you looking at? Is it an epic (a long poem on a heroic subject)? Is it a sonnet (a brief poem, usually consisting of fourteen lines)? Is it an ode? A satire? An elegy? A lyric? Does it fit into a specific literary movement such as Modernism, Romanticism, Neoclassicism, or Renaissance poetry? This is another place where you may need to do some research in an introductory poetry text or encyclopedia to find out what distinguishes specific genres and movements.

Versification: Look closely at the poem's rhyme and meter. Is there an identifiable rhyme scheme? Is there a set number of syllables in each line? The most common meter for poetry in English is iambic pentameter, which has five feet of two syllables each (thus the name "pentameter") in each of which the strongly stressed syllable follows the unstressed syllable. You can learn more about rhyme and meter by consulting our handout on sound and meter in poetry or the introduction to a standard textbook for poetry such as the Norton Anthology of Poetry . Also relevant to this category of concerns are techniques such as caesura (a pause in the middle of a line) and enjambment (continuing a grammatical sentence or clause from one line to the next). Is there anything that you can tell about the poem from the choices that the author has made in this area? For more information about important literary terms, see our handout on the subject.

Figures of speech: Are there literary devices being used that affect how you read the poem? Here are some examples of commonly discussed figures of speech:

• metaphor: comparison between two unlike things
• simile: comparison between two unlike things using "like" or "as"
• metonymy: one thing stands for something else that is closely related to it (For example, using the phrase "the crown" to refer to the king would be an example of metonymy.)
• synecdoche: a part stands in for a whole (For example, in the phrase "all hands on deck," "hands" stands in for the people in the ship's crew.)
• personification: a non-human thing is endowed with human characteristics
• litotes: a double negative is used for poetic effect (example: not unlike, not displeased)
• irony: a difference between the surface meaning of the words and the implications that may be drawn from them

Cultural Context: How does the poem you are looking at relate to the historical context in which it was written? For example, what's the cultural significance of Walt Whitman's famous elegy for Lincoln "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" in light of post-Civil War cultural trends in the U.S.A? How does John Donne's devotional poetry relate to the contentious religious climate in seventeenth-century England? These questions may take you out of the literature section of your library altogether and involve finding out about philosophy, history, religion, economics, music, or the visual arts.

What Style Should I Use?

It is useful to follow some standard conventions when writing about poetry. First, when you analyze a poem, it is best to use present tense rather than past tense for your verbs. Second, you will want to make use of numerous quotations from the poem and explain their meaning and their significance to your argument. After all, if you do not quote the poem itself when you are making an argument about it, you damage your credibility. If your teacher asks for outside criticism of the poem as well, you should also cite points made by other critics that are relevant to your argument. A third point to remember is that there are various citation formats for citing both the material you get from the poems themselves and the information you get from other critical sources. The most common citation format for writing about poetry is the Modern Language Association (MLA) format .

What Is Poetry, and How Is It Different?

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There are as many definitions of poetry as there are poets. William Wordsworth defined poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Emily Dickinson said, "If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry." Dylan Thomas defined poetry this way: "Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing."

Poetry is a lot of things to a lot of people. Homer's epic, " The Odyssey ," described the wanderings of the adventurer, Odysseus, and has been called the greatest story ever told. During the English Renaissance, dramatic poets such as John Milton, Christopher Marlowe, and of course, William Shakespeare gave us enough words to fill textbooks, lecture halls, and universities. Poems from the Romantic period include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "Faust" (1808), Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" (1816), and John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1819).

Shall we go on? Because in order to do so, we would have to continue through 19th-century Japanese poetry, early Americans that include Emily Dickinson and T.S. Eliot, postmodernism, experimentalists, form versus free verse, slam, and so on.

What Defines Poetry?

Perhaps the characteristic most central to the definition of poetry is its unwillingness to be defined, labeled, or nailed down. Poetry is the chiseled marble of language. It is a paint-spattered canvas, but the poet uses words instead of paint, and the canvas is you. Poetic definitions of poetry kind of spiral in on themselves, however, like a dog eating itself from the tail up. Let's get nitty. Let's, in fact, get gritty. We can likely render an accessible definition of poetry by simply looking at its form and its purpose.

One of the most definable characteristics of the poetic form is the economy of language. Poets are miserly and unrelentingly critical in the way they dole out words. Carefully selecting words for conciseness and clarity is standard, even for writers of prose. However, poets go well beyond this, considering a word's emotive qualities, its backstory, its musical value, its double- or triple-entendres, and even its spatial relationship on the page. The poet, through innovation in both word choice and form, seemingly rends significance from thin air.

One may use prose to narrate, describe, argue, or define. There are equally numerous reasons for writing poetry . But poetry, unlike prose, often has an underlying and overarching purpose that goes beyond the literal. Poetry is evocative. It typically provokes in the reader an intense emotion: joy, sorrow, anger, catharsis, love, etc. Poetry has the ability to surprise the reader with an "Ah-ha!" experience and to give revelation, insight, and further understanding of elemental truth and beauty. Like Keats said: "Beauty is truth. Truth, beauty. That is all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know."

How's that? Do we have a definition yet? Let's sum it up like this: Poetry is artistically rendering words in such a way as to evoke intense emotion or an "ah-ha!" experience from the reader, being economical with language and often writing in a set form.   Boiling it down like that doesn't quite satisfy all the nuances, the rich history, and the work that goes into selecting each word, phrase, metaphor, and punctuation mark to craft a written piece of poetry, but it's a start.

It's difficult to shackle poetry with definitions. Poetry is not old, frail, and cerebral. Poetry is stronger and fresher than you think. Poetry is imagination and will break those chains faster than you can say "Harlem Renaissance."

To borrow a phrase, poetry is a riddle wrapped in an enigma swathed in a cardigan sweater... or something like that. An ever-evolving genre, it will shirk definitions at every turn. That continual evolution keeps it alive. Its inherent challenges to doing it well and its ability to get at the core of emotion or learning keep people writing it. The writers are just the first ones to have the ah-ha moments as they're putting the words on the page (and revising them).

Rhythm and Rhyme

If poetry as a genre defies easy description, we can at least look at labels of different kinds of forms. Writing in form doesn't just mean that you need to pick the right words but that you need to have correct rhythm (prescribed stressed and unstressed syllables), follow a rhyming scheme (alternate lines rhyme or consecutive lines rhyme), or use a refrain or repeated line.

Rhythm. You may have heard about writing in iambic pentameter , but don't be intimidated by the jargon. Iambic just means that there is an unstressed syllable that comes before a stressed one. It has a "clip-clop," horse gallop feel. One stressed and one unstressed syllable makes one "foot," of the rhythm, or meter, and five in a row makes up pentameter .  For example, look at this line from Shakespeare's "Romeo & Juliet," which has the stressed syllables bolded: "But, soft ! What light through yon der win dow breaks ?" Shakespeare was a master at iambic pentameter.

Rhyme scheme. Many set forms follow a particular pattern to their rhyming. When analyzing a rhyme scheme, lines are labeled with letters to note what ending of each rhymes with which other. Take this stanza from Edgar Allen Poe 's ballad "Annabel Lee:"

It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee; And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me.

The first and third lines rhyme, and the second, fourth, and sixth lines rhyme, which means it has an a-b-a-b-c-b rhyme scheme, as "thought" does not rhyme with any of the other lines. When lines rhyme and they're next to each other, they're called a rhyming   couplet . Three in a row is called a rhyming triplet . This example does not have a rhyming couplet or triplet because the rhymes are on alternating lines.

Even young schoolchildren are familiar with poetry such as the ballad form (alternating rhyme scheme), the haiku (three lines made up of five syllables, seven syllables, and five syllables), and even the limerick — yes, that's a poetic form in that it has a rhythm and rhyme scheme. It might not be literary, but it is poetry.

Blank verse poems are written in an iambic format, but they don't carry a rhyme scheme. If you want to try your hand at challenging, complex forms, those include the sonnet (Shakespeare's bread and butter), villanelle (such as Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night."), and sestina , which rotates line-ending words in a specific pattern among its six stanzas. For terza rima, check out translations of Dante Alighieri's "The Divine Comedy," which follows this rhyme scheme: aba, bcb, cdc, ded in iambic pentameter.

Free verse doesn't have any rhythm or rhyme scheme, though its words still need to be written economically. Words that start and end lines still have particular weight, even if they don't rhyme or have to follow any particular metering pattern.

The more poetry you read, the better you'll be able to internalize the form and invent within it. When the form seems second nature, then the words will flow from your imagination to fill it more effectively than when you're first learning the form.

Masters in Their Field

The list of masterful poets is long. To find what kinds you like, read a wide variety of poetry, including those already mentioned here. Include poets from around the world and all through time, from the "Tao Te Ching" to Robert Bly and his translations (Pablo Neruda, Rumi, and many others). Read Langston Hughes to Robert Frost. Walt Whitman to Maya Angelou. Sappho to Oscar Wilde. The list goes on and on. With poets of all nationalities and backgrounds putting out work today, your study never really has to end, especially when you find someone's work that sends electricity up your spine.

Flanagan, Mark. "What is Poetry?" Run Spot Run, April 25, 2015.

Grein, Dusty. "How to Write a Sestina (with Examples and Diagrams)." The Society of Classical Poets, December 14, 2016.

Shakespeare, William. "Romeo and Juliet." Paperback, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, June 25, 2015.

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• Singing the Old Songs: Traditional and Literary Ballads
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Home > Poems & Essays > Interviews > Why Poetry: An interview with Matthew Zapruder

Why Poetry: An interview with Matthew Zapruder

by Travis Nichols

Travis Nichols: Let's start with Audre Lorde. What's the difference between poetry and rhetoric? Matthew Zapruder: You're referring to the discussion in Why Poetry of Audre Lorde's poem "Power," which begins, "The difference between poetry and rhetoric/ is being ready to kill/ yourself/ instead of your children." The poem was written in response to the acquittal of a police officer who had murdered a 10 year old boy in Queens. Her lines echo and rewrite Yeats's famous formulation that "we make out of the quarrels with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrels with ourselves, poetry." Lorde's poem challenges the idea that poetry is some refined ethereal space cut off from the troubling messiness of actuality, while also acknowledging that giving up on the idea of poetry as a protected place, one that is in some ways free from the pressures of the outside world, is a very real loss, even a kind of violence to the self. In discussing her poem, what I was interested in was how the pressures of events in the external world can start to seem as if they absolutely demand a response in our poetry, and what that means for us as readers and writers. Many people seem interested in that same question. Travis Nichols: It's such an intense, startling poem, and one I find myself returning to a lot recently, largely, because there's so much to respond to on a daily and even hourly basis right now. There are so many quarrels with others that it feels self-indulgent to pay any attention to the quarrels with ourselves. To read a poem or to write a poem that doesn't deal directly with injustice, that doesn't try to alleviate suffering in a direct way, feels to me more ridiculous than ever. And yet this negotiation is at the heart of your book, and was so even before Trumpism was ascendent. It's always been difficult to negotiate the difference between poetry and rhetoric, through the "pressures of the real," as Stevens has it, but is it worse now? Has your answer to the question, "Why Poetry?" changed in the past year? Matthew Zapruder: I don't think it's self-indulgent, or ridiculous, though I can certainly understand feeling that way, and often do myself. Actually though, I think it's a matter of survival. After the election, in frustration and confusion and despair, I started to write something just to clear my head, that became an essay and eventually the afterword to Why Poetry . In it, I try to make the argument that it is not only possible, but necessary, to preserve a free space inside oneself for the imagination. Probably some of my feelings about this come from having grown up in Washington, D.C., in a home where the minutiae and tactics of politics was a source of endless discussion. It took me some time to realize that this kind of obsession, however well-meaning, can be a distraction. Politics as entertainment, as sports. I also have seen myself and others around me at times become stunned, drained, and less likely to act, the more they follow the minute by minute spectacle of degradation. But really, my belief in these spaces is beyond the merely tactical. I think there are truths about being alive that one can only discover in the imagination by liberating oneself from all obligation. To find those truths and bring them back for others is the role of the artist. And to do so is not only to preserve oneself, but also to open up the possibility, however slender, that someone else you disagree with might do the same, and to cross some kind of border that cannot be crossed by argument or even fact. For a long time, really since my second book (which I wrote during the run-up to the 2004 election), politics has been a part of my poetry, just because thinking and worrying about it is as much as part of my life as anything else. Over the past several years, I have seen so many poets do remarkable things in poetry with politics as material. Poems by Brenda Hillman and Terrance Hayes and Victoria Chang and Shane McCrae and so many others have made me feel simultaneously sadder and more despairing, but also hopeful, in community, more aware and alive. I just read an incredible poem by Patricia Lockwood called "The Pinch" that transformed and re-enlivened so many familiar images and feelings I think so many of us have now. It made me feel more upset and less alone. These poems take the material of the real and transform it. They do something more than merely report or argue. Of course I have seen a lot of bad poetry that either preaches to the converted, or seems mainly designed to position the poet as a correct and decent person. This reminds me of Keats's famous remark about Wordsworth, that he was guilty of the "egotistical sublime," that is, pretending he was awed by nature when really what he was awed by was his own awe, which he wanted the reader to share. I suppose poetry is a particular temptation to that sort of self-projection. But it's also true that we have bigger problems than bad political poems! Travis Nichols: This is what Ann Coulter calls "virtue-signalling," performing the role of right-thinking hero for the right-thinking audience. She does not approve. One of the many things I like about Why Poetry is that it asks us to try to set aside some of these outside interpretations or inferences in favor of a more narrow reading of the text itself. Not forever, but for long enough to get our bearings. You ask readers to look at the words on the page, ask what they could mean, what they might be doing together, why they somehow capture the spirit of poetry, if and when they do. It's a difficult thing, given that we want any excuse not to actually read a poem. It's easier to call Wordsworth a spy than to read his poems. When I was reading Why Poetry , I found myself deeply enjoying poems I thought I had exhausted or that no longer held secrets for me because I had begun having a sort of shorthand for them, assuming I knew everything about them. What made you want to emphasize this kind of close reading? Matthew Zapruder: I really do think that so much of what keeps people away from poetry is a firmly held and incorrect idea about poetic language: that whatever is on the page can't possibly be what is "really" meant. It's a paradox, because to read poetry is to look for that transcendence poetry can give, the way it can bring us out of ordinary experience, into different levels of understanding, or more exciting, even magical realms. But in order for that to happen, a reader has to at first be completely attentive to the words on the page, and read at least at first in the same way we would a piece of prose or any writing. Otherwise there can be no meaningful encounter with a poem. This sounds really obvious, even dumb, but it is my experience as a teacher and poet that this is not something so many people do. It's as if as soon as something is called "poetry," a big scary switch is thrown, and completely ordinary language scares people, making them feel paralyzed. All of the many close readings I do in the book are more or less about demonstrating that the wondrous experiences of poetry always come first out of literal readings, though of course our understanding so often then goes somewhere else, away from the merely literal. There's also something else, which is that poems have an inherent strangeness to them, both in their surfaces and forms (the way they look on the page: line breaks, and sometimes even more aggressive oddities), as well as the strangeness of their movements, which are often unexpected, not linear, associative, leaping. One of the other main purposes of the book was to show how and why the formal qualities of poetry are not merely decorative accessories to meaning, but themselves the source of meaning. I think if people don't know why poets do those things, they don't know how to read or react to them. They might think they are arbitrary or just interferences with "making meaning," when in fact those elements are absolutely essential, at least in good poetry. My hope in the book was to go some way toward clarifying that. Travis Nichols: Do you think your approach here is different from the New Criticism school of Practical Criticism by people like I.A. Richards? Is it a call for readers to return to that kind of interpretation? Matthew Zapruder: My book is not at all a call to return to New Criticism. I do love Richards, I think he is brilliant on metaphor (especially his little book based on his lectures, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, in which he invents the terms "tenor" and "vehicle" which we still use to describe metaphor) and on criticism in general, a very funny and lively writer. I also enjoy reading Cleanth Brooks and William Empson and many of those other New Critics, again because their writing is surprisingly lively, and their minds are super sharp. But I find their insistence that the text itself is all that matters to be way too limiting. When you really dig into it, their reasoning becomes quite circular. In the end they don't actually present a reason why poetry as a distinct genre exists, which is a fatal flaw. Ironically, the New Critics were trying to bring the study and reading of poetry away from paraphrase. They recognized the danger of treating a poem like a story or sermon in disguise: that it would make all the things that make it a poem seem at best decorative, and at worst an annoying interference to the important message (if it's so important, why not just say it clearly and directly?!). But because the New Critics did not successfully articulate a reason for the existence of poetry, what ended up happening is that under their strong and pervasive influence reading poetry became a completely useless exercise in identifying structure, pointing out resonances and similarities with little connection to meaning, and so on. Whenever the issue of meaning did come up, teachers and students understandably either gravitated back to the very sorts of paraphrase that the New Critics were trying to counter ("the theme of this poem is death"), and/or asserted that meaning isn't an operative concept when it comes to poetry. This is still the case. You can see this in the questions that are asked on standardized tests about poetry, which still either reduce the poem to a theme-bearing text, or ask pointless questions about metaphor or imagery or sound. The result has been generations of wounded, irritated and cynical students who go on to think they hate and don't understand poetry. Those critics had immense influence, because their ideas about poetry coincided with the time that poetry, for the first time, began to be taught in a widespread way, not just at university, but to younger students. That's why at some point during the writing of the book I put a lot of time into reading and analyzing the New Critics closely, particularly the best-selling textbook Understanding Poetry , edited by Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Poetry has believe it or not sold many, many millions of copies, and the odds are good that your English teacher, and your parents, and maybe even you, read that book in class. The fact is, it's kind of a disaster of a book, because it fails to explain why we should bother with poetry in the first place, why it is the way it is, and does what it does, which creates the above mentioned vacuum in meaning. In the end, I cut many thousands of words from the book that I had written about that textbook and other widely-used ones (like Laurence Perrine's Sound and Sense and others), mainly because the writing I did about them turned out to be super boring. But I'm glad I did the work, for my own sake. Travis Nichols: As someone who has written about poetry and been in many conversations about how and if to make it accessible to wider audiences, I have a lot of admiration for what you've done here. You try throughout Why Poetry to speak as plainly as possible without being reductive, without dumbing the poems down into paraphrase or aphorism, while at the same time not retreating into jargon. As a poet, the process can necessarily be mysterious. You try to say something, you meet resistance, and out of that resistance comes a poem. It is always tempting to put on the robes of the high priest, light the incense and say, "Poetry is a mystery! Only if you are pure of spirit will you be able to understand!" I sometimes do this in the privacy of my own home but even my small children find it tedious. Was it a struggle to write this way about something that does, as you say, bring us out of our everyday experience into magical realms? Matthew Zapruder: Please tell me you actually put on robes and light incense before you read poetry. That would be awesome. Your kids would love it I'm sure. Before I got my MFA, I was getting a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures, so I had a lot of exposure to that sort of jargon-y, highly technical talk about literature. It's something I dove into and came out on the other side of, and consciously turned away from when I began to devote my life to the writing of poetry. That sort of talk and writing is definitely interesting to some people, and occasionally quite useful in clarifying issues that come up in texts, but for the general reader, most of that terminology and conceptualizing is not so helpful. It's definitely not helpful (and is also demonstrably not true) to feel like you have to know a lot of specialized terminology in order to have a meaningful experience with a poem. Oddly though, there is one whole chapter in the book devoted to a literary theoretical concept, Viktor Shklovsky's defamiliarization, because it's an incredibly useful way to think about poetry. I feel the same way about this as I do about the deeper meanings, literary allusions, historical references, and so on in poems: those things can be ways of appreciating a literary text more deeply, giving more pleasure and understanding, but they are I believe secondary to primary encounters that do not require any special training or knowledge. I guess in the end I am basically a humanist when it comes to literature: I think most of us simply by virtue of being alive, and therefore experienced language users, have the basic equipment to read most literature. Sometimes you need a little help with something, but mostly it's there on the page for anyone. Maybe that is just what I would like to believe, since I am not a scholar, but a producer of literary texts, ones that I hope could be read by any person. Part of writing the book was to test out that hypothesis, and I was relieved to discover at the end that I still thought this was the case. As far as whether it was hard, the answer is yes, but not because I was tempted to write in jargon or using literary theory. I needed to write clearly and directly, and answer the questions that so often come up from general readers about poetry, without ever talking down to anyone, or being reductive, or oversimplifying. That's why it took so many years of writing and rewriting: often I would explain a concept or poem, and then realize that I had gone too far in one direction, or that I had made things too definitive, and didn't really agree with what I had written. So I went back in, again and again and again. Also, I depended on my most trusted readers (some poets, but not all) to tell me if I what I had written made sense, and seemed true. Travis Nichols: Were there any particular poets you found yourself going back to? Any surprises? Matthew Zapruder: I began the book writing about a poem by John Ashbery, "The One Thing That Can Save America," for a lecture I gave at the Tin House Summer Workshop. In that lecture, I touched on most of the themes I would eventually write about in the book. Initially, I thought the subject and effect of the poem was mainly about creating a space of contemplation and privacy and mystery, and that the "thing" that was going to "save America" was, basically, the dream state created by the poem itself. That's how Wallace Stevens talked about poetry, and I write quite a bit about Stevens's ideas in my discussion of the Ashbery poem. I still do think that is part of what the poem asserts. But something always bothered me about that. It seemed to be missing something essential, and in a fundamental way falling into the trap of diminishing Ashbery, reducing him to merely a poet of affect, interested only in creating a dream state. The more I read and reread the poem, I realized that it did have a subject matter, and that this subject was also, obliquely, democracy, and other matters related to community, and what concerns us most in our personal and civic lives. The poem revealed itself as being in a way deeply political, which was something I didn't really see at first. This happened with several other poems in the book. It also happened most notably for me in the concept of the symbol. Initially, as I said above, one of my main motivations in writing the book was to argue against knee-jerk symbolic readings of poetry, ones that immediately assume that a word or image must "really" mean something else, something supposedly deeper, but which so often turns out to be banal, not really strange or interesting at all. Poetry teachers often call this sort of analysis "symbol hunting." In early drafts of the book I was highly derogatory about this, and one-sided. But the more I thought and read about symbols, the more I realized that while symbol hunting is not a good way to read poetry, what I call "true symbolism" is intimately related to the nature of poetry. At some point in the book I write that all poets are more or less symbolists, in that they are looking for the way the ordinary can (by means of the poem) become something other than ordinary, something strange and magical and transcendent. I knew this was true from reading and writing poetry, but until I wrote about this for many years, I didn't really understand it. It was super hard to explain the difference between symbol hunting and true symbolism, but I think absolutely essential. Travis Nichols: Because this is a book about poetry, partisans from different camps are likely to lose their minds arguing about your methods, interpretations, and suggestions. Does that worry you? Matthew Zapruder: I haven't been so worried, though maybe I should be. I tried to include and discuss a wide a range of poetry (though I'm sure I missed so much, mainly so that the book wouldn't end up being 9000 pages long), not only because that reflects my own reading habits, but because to be truly useful, what I'm saying has to apply to all poetry. Probably that very attempt is, in and of itself, so presumptuous as to invite disagreement. Were there particular contentions in the book that you thought might be likely to set people off? Travis Nichols: That's probably the main one, that there could be something universal or agreed-upon about the idea of what poetry is. I like the question, and I find it's actually one that can start interesting conversations with people who don't consider themselves poets, or even poetry readers. Everyone has an idea about what it is, but few people want to read it, which is a curious disconnect. I am so out of the loop with contemporary criticism and theory that I feel like a golden retriever trying to mail a letter articulating this, so bear with me, but I feel like there is a way of talking about art that primarily foregrounds the cultural and socio-economic context of the art-making process rather than the end product. If that was my orientation as a reader, then I'd feel like you were telling readers to look at poems in a way that limited their understanding. But I'm not sure this is an interesting road for us to go down, so I'll leave it to you to decide. I'm also interested in what kind of assumptions I could make about this book expressing your sensibility as an editor. Matthew Zapruder: It's not hard for me to imagine someone objecting to the idea that there is something universal to be said about poetry, or the very idea that poetry is a distinct genre. It's certainly not fashionable to talk about genres right now, unless you are talking about crossing over or combining them. But as I write in the introduction, even if you feel that way about genre, when it comes to poetry it's helpful to think about it temporarily, without of course ultimately being beholden to it. Anyway, I would hope if someone objected to my trying to say something universal about poetry, that it wasn't just on principle, that you can't say anything universal about anything. That just doesn't seem like a very interesting thing to disagree about. It would take us quickly away from talking about poetry, and into the realm of undergraduate dorm room epistemology or something else yawny. In the most basic sense, the point I am trying to make is that the continued persistence of poetry as a human activity, across time and cultures, has to do with something it does that is different from all other types of writing. How it refuses to be beholden to all the other things we use language for. How it turns distractibility, inconsistency, dreaminess, leaping, all those things that we scrub out of everyday life and functionality, into something to be treasured. How it continually prioritizes an interest in the very nature of language itself: as material that has a sound, visual qualities, feels a certain way in the mouth, etc., and also in the larger sense as a thing that attempts—and ultimately fails—to completely represent the world. It seems interesting to me to think about what connects Sappho to Rumi to Keats to Basho to Eluard to James Tate to Alice Notley to Victoria Chang. My instinct is that there is something. It's just an instinct, but it's one that comes out of a long time of being a poet, and also reading and thinking about it. The intellectual project of the book is to investigate this. Someone else's intellectual project could be to tell me why I am wrong, but even so, maybe they will find my attempt interesting and worth reading. I do feel quite strongly that given the current state of thinking and discussion about poetry, that unless we open up these questions in some more interesting ways, people just aren't going to be having very worthwhile reading experiences. Time and again, I have the experience of talking to really brilliant people, writers and artists and also very smart educated people outside of the literary world, who have absolutely the most limited and boring ideas about poetry that you could imagine. They often have in their mind some version of the idea that the whole point of a poem is to get past all the decorative crap and figure out what the message is, what it's really trying to say. It's as if people still thought that a painting wasn't any good unless it looked like whatever it was trying to represent, and that any deviation from "reality," anything that made it a painting and not just a photorealist representation of the world, was an interference. No one thinks that about painting anymore. Poetry needs to catch up. Travis Nichols: The other criticism I can imagine is from the "I don't know about art but I know what I like" camp. I thought of it as I was reading "Suite For Barbara Loden" by Nathalie Leger, which has this quote from an actor: "I lack both the idea and the words, I have only the feeling." There is a group of dedicated poetry readers who love the poems they love, but they don't want analysis to impede their enjoyment. They have only the feeling. Do you think it's worthwhile to engage that mindset? Matthew Zapruder: It seems to me if you like some poems, there are other poems and poets you will like as well. Maybe you just haven't heard of them yet. Because I can't talk individually to everyone who might read this book, I can't just say, well, you like this, check this other thing out. So I am trying to make deeper, more conceptual connections, that can be applied to very different types and styles of poetry. I hope this book will help open up some of the reasons why a reader might love certain poems or poets, not (as Wordsworth wrote) to murder to dissect, but so they can find other poems that do similar things, or maybe even very different ones. One of my biggest fears is that people might think I'm not interested in meaning at all. I gave a lecture at a few years ago at the Tin House Summer Workshop in Portland, in which I discussed an idea that "about" was a limited idea in poetry, very close to "looks like" in painting. I came up with the phrase "about aboutness," in order to explain that way a poem makes meaning less by getting a message across, and more by creating a state of dreamy attentiveness particular to poetry. Of course this effect is created through the meaning-making properties of words, and language. The reaction to this from some people was to assume that I was saying poems aren't about anything at all, which is not what as I think, as should (I hope) be obvious to anyone who reads my poems or prose about poetry. It might seem that in my focus on the material of language, I am asserting that the effects of poetry are less about what it means than how. It's definitely true that I think the how (and why) of poetry require far more explanation than the what. The what is so often what ends up getting talked about in school, with a little bit of how thrown in on top, and no why at all. The effects of that are hugely detrimental, as I've tried to explain above. But I also believe that meaning-making is inextricably, thankfully, bound up in the effects of poetry. I just think meaning-making works differently in poetry than in prose. The chapters I write on associative movement, leaping, negative capability, and symbols attempt to illuminate some different ways that poets activate the meaning-making capacities of language using the tools of prose, but also moving beyond them. For me, poetry doesn't leave behind the ways meaning is made in prose and everyday conversation: it takes those meanings and uses them while also doing different things with them too, and adding as well an equal interest in the material of language itself (its sounds, the tenuous yet essential relationship it has to whatever it is trying to represent, and so on). This creates an enormous set of possibilities for the poet. The poet gives up certain things prose does, in exchange for something else. In my book, I try to talk about what that something else is, and how it manifests in so many different forms. Which is why there are so many different types of poems, and why in their own ways they can each and all be poetry. If my book is able to bring readers closer to more poems, to help them find deep meaning in those poems according to their own particular interests, preferences, and proclivities, then I will have succeeded. *** Matthew Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts , a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Sun Bear , Copper Canyon 2014, as well as Why Poetry , a book of prose, from Ecco Press in August 2017. An Associate Professor in the MFA Program at Saint Mary's College of California, he is also Editor at Large at Wave Books. The 2016-17 Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine, he lives in Oakland, CA. P hoto credit: B.A. Van Sise. Travis Nichols is the author of two poetry collections, Iowa Letter Machine Editions) and See Me Improving (Copper Canyon Press), as well as two novels, Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder and See Me Improving (Coffee House Press). He works at Greenpeace USA. Follow him on Twitter: @travisjnichols

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• Glossary of Poetic Genres

Whereas a "form" defines the way a poem arranges sounds, rhythms, or its appearance on the page, "genre" is something like the poem's style. Many poetic genres have a long history, and new poems almost always seek to explore a new aspect of the traditional style and thus to redefine the genre in some way. The following list is a selection of the major genres of poetry.

• The Poetry Foundation : poems listed by glossary term.
• Representative Poetry Online : glossary with links to full-text poems.
• Key to Poetic Forms
• Guide to Poetic Terms
• Guide to Prosody

Here are 9 Poetry Genres Explained With Examples

All of us have studied  poetry  in our school days! Many of us have also tried to write poetry at some point, in our lives. Whether it was to vent out our feelings or perhaps for an academic purpose. Sometimes, even to impress a special someone! Podium in its various blogs have talked about the various benefits of  learning   creative writing . In this article, we will learn about different poetry genres. We will also see a few  examples  of each of these major genres. This will absolutely enhance your basic knowledge of how poetry can be categorized. Nonetheless, it might also motivate you to produce a creation pertaining to one of these genres.

What is poetry?

What are poetry genres, narrative poetry, epic poetry, dramatic poetry, satirical poetry, lyric poetry, elegy poetry, speculative poetry, more about different poetry genres.

Poetry , of course, is a part of literature and is one of the earliest and oldest forms of writing. One can communicate their feelings and evoke emotions through poetry just as other forms of literature and art do. They can even talk about a certain social or political issue. One can also pass commentary on their personal life by using poetry as a necessary tool. It can as well be about the world around them.

Poetry will always be universal because it can be written in any  language . It is also one of the most interesting forms of art because of the various figures of  speech . For instance,  alliteration , onomatopoeia, transferred epithet, personification, pathetic fallacy, synecdoche, metonymy, simile, metaphor, among others. These poetic forms or devices can be incorporated into the poems to make them more artistic.

Along with that, many poets choose to rhyme the lines of their poems. Thus, this lends a certain flow to the poem. This is known as the rhyme scheme of the poem. Poets also use metre which is a very significant feature of poetry. This is called so as it provides the poem with a  rhythm  that adds to the sentiment of the theme and genre.

Also Read:  What is Haiku Poetry?

The word ‘genre’ is actually French and it means a ‘kind of something’ or a ‘sort of something’. The concept originated in Ancient Greece and was brought forth by the philosopher, Plato. He had segregated literature into three different groups – poetry,  drama , and  prose . The easiest way to understand the meaning of genres is by looking at them as the categories of any  mode  of  communication . Whether it is an artwork, or book, films, television series, music, and of course, poems, to name a few. Based on the trends of the day and age, each of these forms is divided into numerous categories. They are then further segregated into thematic and stylistic divisions. This categorization is called the genre. Now, let’s have a look at the nine different poetry genres!

Knowing different poetry genres improves your ability to convey a  message  through writing.

Also Read:  Free Verse Poetry: Know What Is Free-Verse Poetry?

Understand Poetry In An Easier Way!

Narrative  poetry is one of the most common poetic forms. It is a type of poetic form that tells stories and tales through verses. This poetic form is very much similar to a novel. It is quite similar to a short story that has a  plot , character, and setting. Narrative poetry depicts a series of events, including actions and  dialogues . It uses a number of poetic methods such as rhyme, meter, and rhyming scheme. Usually, a narrative poem has a single speaker who is known as the narrator; a narrator is a person who recites the entire story from the beginning to the end.

For example, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘ The Raven ’ is a narrative poem. This poem presents a grieving man’s mysterious confrontation with a raven and his descent into despair. The grieving man is the narrator of this poem. Another example of narrative poetry is the old English poem ‘Beowulf’. It is the story of the heroic warrior Beowulf who hears about Grendel. It is a destructive monster who destroys the kingdom of King Hrothgar.

Beowulf is able to defeat Grendel but his troubles are not over here. This is because Grendel’s mother wishes to take her revenge. In the end, Beowulf is not only able to defeat Grendel’s mother but also become the King of the Geats. Eventually, he dies in a fight with a dragon. The poem ends in the manner of a tribute to Beowulf for all that he had accomplished during his lifetime.

An epic poetry is a length narrative poem. It highlights the intricate details, features, and journey of its characters from a remote  past . These long poems typically detail extraordinary feats and  adventures  of characters from a distant past. The epic poems have certain special qualities that categorize them in this specific genre. The hero is always going to be a famous legendary figure. Either from mythology or because of his unbelievable heroic accomplishments.

The poem itself spans over several nations throughout the world or might encompass various kingdoms. The characters are extremely  brave  and often perform feats that are beyond human capabilities. Although such texts are lengthy, they are still written in verse and not in prose. Lastly, divine intervention is something that is not only common but expected inclusion in an epic poem.

‘ The Iliad ’ and ‘ The Odyssey ’ by  Homer  are great examples of epic poetry because both give a detailed description of the journey or the events of the Trojan War and about the life of Ulysses. Ulysses was a great king who enjoyed traveling and the poem talks about his journey after the Trojan war. ‘ Mahabharata ’ is also an excellent example of an epic poetry. This poem is written in Sanskrit language. It is a beautifully written poem and to be precise, one of the longest poems.

Dramatic poetry is poetic form that tells a story to its readers and usually has a narrator. The most popular kind of dramatic poetry is a dramatic monologue. Another name for a dramatic monologue is the persona poem. Such type of monologue utilizes the first-person  point of view . These poems have a long speech. The narrator is the only speaker and is addressing an unknown audience or character. Here the narrator appears as if the readers are overhearing the conversation.

For example, ‘ My Last Duchess ’ by Robert Browning is a beautiful dark poem. While reading a poem like this, it feels as if one is unfolding a secret or a story. This, in turn, makes it even more exciting and intriguing. In ‘My Last Duchess’, the duke is describing the portrait of his last duchess. She was his late wife and his journey with the duchess. The unique style of this type of poem allows the readers to ponder their thoughts and understanding and evokes emotions in them. The master of the dramatic monologue is Robert Browning. This is because of his penchant liking for writing in this form.

A dramatic monologue usually includes all or a few of the following elements. A  fiction  speaker and audience, a symbolic setting, Talismanic props, dramatic  gestures , and emphasis on the speaker’s subjectivity. Along with this, a focus on dramatics, problematics of  irony  or non-irony, and involved reader’s role-playing. Browning presents all these ingredients in the most appealing and fascinating platter. ‘My Last Duchess’ is his all- time  masterpiece when it came to dramatic monologues. This poem serves as the perfect example of a dramatic poem.

Satire  is a work of literature that highlights follies and human vices. It also throws light upon stupidity and ridicule. Social dysfunction or obnoxious individuals, or both are the targets of satire. The satirical poem makes fun of someone’s vice, absurdities, foolishness, injustice, abuses, shortcomings, or moral failing. Inspiring or warning the readers is the goal of this kind of poem. The satirical poem is a mockery for the readers to either laugh at or to learn something from it.

An example of satirical poetry is Alexander Pope’s ‘ The Rape of the Lock ’. ‘The Rape of the Lock’ is a rare instance in which a light theme is given an exalted treatment. This is done for satirical purpose. All through the poem, the importance is given to things that are unimportant, insignificant, practically meaningless, and farcical. Broadly, the very conception of writing an epic on the rape of a lock of hair is funny. It bears testimony to the poet’s effort to make the little things great and the great things little. In ‘The Rape of the Lock’ the balance is nicely trimmed between the concealed irony and the assumed gravity . It is the triumph of insignificance, the apotheosis of foppery and folly.

As the name suggests, a lyric poem is short and highly musical in tone. A lyric poem is capable of conveying strong, intense emotions and feelings to the readers. The lyric poets make use of various rhymes, literary devices, and metre to give  song -like touch to the poem. A lyric poem is short and doesn’t necessarily tell a detailed story or journey. Thus, a lyric poem is like a personal expression of emotions and feelings by a single speaker.

A very interesting example is William Wordsworth’s “ The World Is Too Much With Us ”

Also Read:  Poetry Types: 7 different types of poetry with examples

An elegy is one of the poetry genres that resonates with death or loss. The elegy usually comprises themes of grief, sadness, loss, redemption, compassion, and reflection. Traditionally in elegy the verses are in couplets. Although, earlier elegies didn’t follow any set rules and have no set form or style. Hence there was extensive liberty towards the rhyming scheme and metre.

One of the finest examples of such poetry is ‘ Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard ’ by Thomas Gray. The poem is an elegy expressing the emotions of the poet after the death of the poet Richard West in 1742. Another example of elegiac poetry is ‘ Adonais: An Elegy on the death of John Keats ’.  P.B.  Shelley wrote this pastoral elegy in 1821 in remembrance of the Romantic poet, John Keats who passed away the same year succumbing to tuberculosis. Although Shelley and Keats were not great friends, they did share comradeship, and Shelley was impressed with the young poet. Upon finding out about his illness, Shelley even offered to help him recuperate in Italy. Upon Keats’ death, Shelley penned down the elegy ‘Adonais’ and himself passed away within a year of the publication, supposedly with a volume of Keats’ poetry in his pocket.

There are two  types  of verse poems out of which are – the free-verse poems and the other one is the blank verse poems. Though they might appear to be similar in names they are quite different. Free verse poetry is free of rules and regulations; as a result, it lacks a consistent rhyme scheme, metre, or musical structure. Moving on, blank verse poetry follows a much stricter structure with a precise metre. The blank verse follows no rhyme scheme. It is unpreferable to use free verse. Nonetheless, poetry in blank verse is popular.

Poets like  Shakespeare  and Milton favoured Blank verse style. For instance, Shakespeare wrote Sonnet 130 in blank verse whereas Walt Whitman’s wrote ‘ Leaves of Grass ’ in free verse. Another instance of a poem written in free verse is W. H. Auden’s ‘ Musee des Beaux Arts ’. As the poem begins, the speaker, a sophisticated, educated, and urbane man, makes a sweeping generalization of the “Old Masters” and about their representation of suffering.

The speaker makes references to multiple paintings to emphasize his argument that suffering has its place in the ebb and flow of life. It is not special and occurs alongside the most ordinary activities like “eating or opening the window or just walking dully along”. The speaker’s premise in the first stanza was that suffering, unconsciously, goes unnoticed by mankind.

In the second stanza, he changes the direction of this premise and says that suffering is deliberately not noticed by mankind. This tells us that he has now entered into the world of the  painting  and is adding fictitious details to it. Therefore, his description is ekphrastic as well as imaginative. This contrasts with the speaker’s tone in the first stanza. A man engaged in philosophical musing is what it is about.

Fable is another common poetry genres. A Fable is poetic story written in verse or prose with a moral or didactic at the end. Traditionally fables make use of  animals  instead of humans as characters or leads to illustrate and explain a valuable lesson. ‘ A Grain of Salt ’ by Audrey Heller is a classic example of poetry from this genre.

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Speculative poetry depicts or illustrates themes of  science  fiction and mythology . In layman’s term speculative means to be unsure or something one is uncertain about. Hence, something unknown inspires the speculative poems. Science fiction poetry or fantasy poetry with a scientific touch is another name for Speculative Poetry. Speculative poetry is judged and defined based on its theme or subject in focus which makes it different from the other types of poetry.

Christina Rossetti’s ‘ Goblin Market ’ is an interesting example of speculative poetry. This poem draws our attention to the themes of temptation and redemption. ‘Goblin Market’ is a story of two sisters visiting Goblin market selling goblin  fruits .

Q. What is the best genre of poetry?

A. There is no such genre of poetry that can be termed as the best. This is so because poetry, like any other works of art, is subjective. Which means that each individual will perceive it differently. Therefore, what is best for one individual may not be the best for another. One should choose the best genre of poetry based on their personal preferences.

Q. How to start writing poetry?

A. There are many ways to induce the creative writing process, however, it is critical to understand that not everyone writes at the same speed. For some, it may just an hour to finish writing a poem and for others, it may take a month. Along with that, seeking inspiration from one’s surroundings, personal life and experiences, social situations, as well as  nature , become the perfect ingredients for poetry.

Q. What are some examples of Elegy?

A. Some examples of Elegy are ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ by Walt Whitman which he wrote in memory of President Abraham Lincoln. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’ is another example of Elegy written in remembrance of Tennyson’s close friend Arthur Henry Hallam.

Q. What are figures of speech?

A. Poets generally use figures of speech. They are a non-literal expression of things. It adds to the poetic and aesthetic qualities of the work of art and also showcases the vast knowledge and understanding of the poet when it comes to the technicalities of writing poems or other forms of literature. Moreover, it makes the poetic piece sound more beautiful. Some examples of figures of speech are hyperbole, alliteration, simile, metaphor, personification, pathetic fallacy, oxymoron, transferred epithet, onomatopoeia, metonymy, paradox, antithesis, assonance, repetition, apostrophe, pun, and synecdoche.

Q. What is hyperbole?

A. Hyperbole is a  figure of speech  or poetic device used in literature to convey something in an exaggerated manner. This lends aesthetic value to a poem which transcends reality with the help of the figure of speech. Examples of hyperbole are present in poem ‘Daffodils’ by William Wordsworth when he writes about the number of daffodils present in the field and declares that he can see ten thousand in each glance which is realistically impossible. Still it helps the reader to comprehend the sheer number of the golden daffodils in the field.

‘Ten thousand saw I at a glance,’

Q. What are two features of epic poetry?

A. The first feature of epic poetry is the inclusion of Gods and Goddesses or at the very least semi-Gods such as seen in Homer’s character Achilles in ‘The Iliad’. The epic poetry always begins with an invocation to the nine Muses.

Q. What is a sonnet?

A. Originally begun in Italy, a sonnet is a form of poetry. Although  William Shakespeare  modified the sonnet in England, its pioneer was actually Petrarch. In a sonnet, an iambic pentameter is used. A sonnet contains only fourteen lines.

Q. What happens when a poet does not name his or her poem?

A. When a poet does not name his or her poem  then  the poem is usually known by the first line of the poem itself. For instance, Shakespeare’s sonnet ‘Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds’ does not have a name but first line of the sonnet became its name. On the other hand, if the poems belong to a certain sequence or collection then the poems could also be given a certain numerical figure. To consider the same example, ‘Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds’, the sonnet belongs to a large sonnet sequence of a hundred and fifty-four sonnets and so, this particular sonnet is also called ‘Sonnet 116’.

Q. What is ekphrastic poetry?

A. The word ‘ekphrasis’ is actually Greek and it means ‘speaking out’. It is a verbal or written representation of a graphic presentation. This sort of poetry generally describes visual art in verbal terms. An example of such poetry is John Keats’ ‘An Ode to a Grecian Urn’.

In conclusion, regardless of whether one is a student, a poetry enthusiast, or just someone trying to learn something new, this lesson will definitely help one improve their basic understanding of the nine different  genres of poetry . This article has also explored the meaning of poetry in great detail and the salient features attached to it which make it stand out from other basic poems. Gradually, it becomes easy to categorize your own poetry with the help of these genres. Take out your pens & papers because now you are ready to begin with your very own poem which could belong to any of these beautiful and interesting genres!

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In a Poem, Just Who Is ‘the Speaker,’ Anyway?

Critics and readers love the term, but it can be awfully slippery to pin down. That’s what makes it so fun to try.

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By Elisa Gabbert

Elisa Gabbert’s collections of poetry and essays include, most recently, “Normal Distance” and the forthcoming “Any Person Is the Only Self.” Her On Poetry columns appear four times a year.

The pages of “A Little White Shadow,” by Mary Ruefle, house a lyric “I” — the ghost voice that emerges so often from what we call a poem. Yet the I belonged first to another book, a Christian text of the same name published in 1890, by Emily Malbone Morgan.

Ruefle “erased” most words of Morgan’s text with white paint, leaving what look like lines of verse on the yellowed pages: “my brain/grows weary/just thinking how to make/thought.” (My virgules are approximate — should I read all white gaps as line breaks, even if the words are in the same line of prose? Are larger gaps meant to form stanzas?)

On another page, we read (can I say Ruefle writes ?): “I was brought in contact/with the phenomenon/peculiar to/’A/shadow.’” It would be difficult to read Ruefle’s book without attributing that I to the author, to Ruefle, one way or another, although the book’s I existed long before she did.

This method of finding an I out there, already typed, to identify with, seems to me not much different from typing an I . An I on the page is abstract, symbolic, and not the same I as in speech, which in itself is not the same I as the I in the mind.

When an old friend asked me recently if I didn’t find the idea of “the speaker” to be somewhat underexamined, I was surprised by the force of the YES that rose up in me. I too had been following the critical convention of referring to whatever point of view a poem seems to generate as “the speaker” — a useful convention in that it (supposedly) prevents us from ascribing the views of the poem to its author. But in that moment I realized I feel a little fraudulent doing so. Why is that?

Perhaps because I never think of a “speaker” when writing a poem. I don’t posit some paper-doll self that I can make say things. It’s more true to say that the poem always gives my own I, my mind’s I, the magic ability to say things I wouldn’t in speech or in prose.

It’s not just that the poem, like a play or a novel, is fictive — that these genres offer plausible deniability, though they do. It’s also that formal constraints have the power to give us new thoughts. Sometimes, in order to make a line sound good, to fit the shape of the poem, I’m forced to cut a word or choose a different word, and what I thought I wanted to say gets more interesting. The poem has more surprising thoughts than I do.

“The speaker,” as a concept, makes two strong suggestions. One is that the voice of a poem is a kind of persona. In fact, when I looked for an entry on the subject in our New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (a tome if there ever was one, at 1,383 pages), I found only: “Speaker: See PERSONA.” This latter term is an “ancient distinction,” writes the scholar Fabian Gudas, between poems in the poet’s “own voice” and those in which “characters” are speaking.

But, as the entry goes on to note, 20th-century critics have questioned whether we can ever look at a poem as “the direct utterance of its author.” While persona seems too strong to apply to some first-person lyrics, the speaker implies all lyrics wear a veil of persona, at least, if not a full mask.

The second implication is that the voice is a voice — that a poem has spokenness , even just lying there silent on the page.

The question here, the one I think my friend was asking, is this: Does our use of “the speaker” as shorthand — for responsible readership, respectful acknowledgment of distance between poet and text — sort of let us off the hook? Does it give us an excuse to think less deeply than we might about degrees of persona and spokenness in any given poem?

Take Louise Glück’s “The Wild Iris,” “a book in which flowers speak,” as Glück herself described it. One flower speaks this, in “Trillium”: “I woke up ignorant in a forest;/only a moment ago, I didn’t know my voice/if one were given me/would be so full of grief.” (I find a note that I’ve stuck on this page, at some point: The flowers give permission to express .)

“Flowers don’t have voices,” James Longenbach writes, in his essay “The Spokenness of Poetry” — “but it takes a flower to remind us that poems don’t really have voices either.”

They’re more like scores for voices, maybe. A score isn’t music — it’s paper, not sound — and, as Jos Charles writes in an essay in “Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That Matter Most,” “the written poem is often mistaken for the poem itself.” A poem, like a piece of music, she writes, “is neither its score nor any one performance,” but what is repeatable across all performances. Any reader reading a poem performs it — we channel the ghost voice.

There are poems that have almost no spokenness — such as Aram Saroyan’s “minimal poems,” which might consist of a single nonword on the page (“lighght,” most famously, but see also “morni,ng” or “Blod”). Or consider Paul Violi’s “Index,” whose first line is “Hudney, Sutej IX, X, XI, 7, 9, 25, 58, 60, 61, 64.” Is anyone speaking the page numbers?

And there are poems that have almost no persona, as in the microgenre whose speaker is a poetry instructor (see “Introduction to Poetry,” by Billy Collins).

Yet I’m not interested only in edge cases. There are so many subtle gradations of “speaker” in the middle, so much room for permission. A speaker may seem threatening, as in June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights”: “from now on my resistance … may very well cost you your life.” A speaker may seem dishonest — Tove Ditlevsen’s first published poem was called “To My Dead Child,” addressing a stillborn infant who had in fact never existed.

Auden would say it’s hard not to “tell lies” in a poem, where “all facts and all beliefs cease to be true or false and become interesting possibilities.” So, we might say, the “speaker” is the vessel for the full range of lies that the poet is willing to tell.

“Poetry is not for personal confessions,” George Seferis wrote in a journal; “it expresses another personality that belongs to everyone.” This suggests poetry comes from some underlying self. If, by invoking “the speaker,” I avoid a conflation of the I and its author, I may also crowd the page with more figures than I need: a speaker and an author, both outside the poem. I wonder sometimes if there’s anyone there, when I’m reading. Does the speaker speak the poem? Or does the poem just speak?

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Bennington College Curriculum Fall 2022

Genres and forms of poetry (lit4164.01).

This course will closely examine various modes in which poetry is commonly written, including the elegy, the ode, the ekphrastic, the prose poem, the pastoral, the aubade, and the litany. Students will also be introduced to the vocabulary and practice of traditional prosody, acquire a familiarity with writing in meter and using rhyme, and attempt traditional forms such as the sonnet, the villanelle, the sestina, the pantoum, the ghazal, and the abecedarian. Particular attention will be paid to the evolution of traditional forms and the myriad ways contemporary poets approach form and prosody. Poets whose work will be discussed will likely include Agha Shahid Ali, Rick Barot, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Jericho Brown, Inger Christensen, torrin a. greathouse, Terrance Hayes, Randall Mann, Hannah Sanghee Park, Kiki Petrosino, and Evie Shockley. Each week, students will read a packet of poems (or volume of poetry) in a given genre, and will attempt a poem in the genre or form being discussed. At the end of the term, students will submit a final portfolio of poems with a critical introductory essay.