What is Poetry?: Helping You Define Poetry for Yourself

What is poetry? Well, it’s the oldest form of literature, a full-throated inquiry into the human experience, a means of compressing life into the fewest words, etc.

All of these things are true, yet none of them convey a useful introduction to poetry. Defining this deceptive term d’arte is hard. Not because we can’t easily identify a poem, but because poetry has a wide range of definitions and histories.

So, let’s provide them all then. This article answers the question “what is poetry?” at a formal, philosophical, and personal level. We will examine a brief history of poetry, look at how poets themselves have defined poetry, and answer, decisively, what makes a poem, a poem.

But first and foremost, what is poetry?

Poetry Definition: Introduction to Poetry

Poetry is, at its most basic, the deliberate use of artful language to convey essential truths about the world.

Poetry definition: the deliberate use of artful language to convey essential truths about the world.

Now, if that poetry definition seems kind of basic and wildly abstract, it kind of is. But that’s because, if we get any more particular, we’re bound to come across exceptions.

For example, I didn’t mention line breaks in that definition. Line breaks are a common craft tool for poets, but prose poets don’t use line breaks, and a prose poem falls under the category of poetry.

Or, I could have mentioned that a poem is about the poet’s personal life. But then I would be excluding persona poetry, a form of poetry in which the poet adopts the voice of another person or entity and writes from their perspective.

Poetry is an expansive, hard-to-summarize form of literature. Poetry is the summary of itself. So let’s get in the weeds of this a little further. What is poetry at the formal, philosophical, and personal level?

What is Poetry at the Formal Level?

What differentiates poetry from prose? (And why do prose poems have to come and make things more complicated?)

Prose is any sort of linear text, written in sentences and paragraphs, in which the text gets broken randomly at the end of the page. This blogpost that you’re currently reading is an example of prose. Prose typically communicates ideas and information, as well as stories.

Prose is any sort of linear text, written in sentences and paragraphs, in which the text gets broken randomly at the end of the page. Poetry, by contrast, is not as linear in form or syntax.

Poetry, by contrast, is not as linear in form or syntax. The sentence structures of poetry tend to be more complex. Additionally, poetry also utilizes line breaks, meaning that a line of text is intentionally broken, sometimes creating contrasts or double meanings in the text. This makes the line its own discrete unit of poetry.

Prose; words in their best order; – poetry; the best words in the best order. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Here’s a short but powerful example of poetry: “Dreams” by Langston Hughes.

Prose poetry falls under the umbrella of poetry, though it’s also its own thing. It is poetry that, like prose, is written from one end of the page to the other, with lines randomly broken. In forsaking the sacred line break, prose poems require a different attention to word choice, but you can easily identify prose poetry vis a vis regular prose, as the language is more artful and elevated, and the writing imparts feelings and philosophies, rather than just stories or information.

Here’s an example of prose poetry: “Be Drunk” by Charles Baudelaire

See the difference? Learn more about poetry vs prose here:

https://writers.com/prose-vs-poetry

What is Poetry at the Philosophical Level?

Identifying the formal distinctions between prose and poetry are helpful, but perhaps not enough. Just adding line breaks to a piece of prose does not make it a poem. Here’s why:

All I did here was chop up a sentence. Sure, it looks like a poem. But adding those line breaks didn’t alter the meaning of the text; I didn’t uncover anything true, unusual, surprising, or human in doing this.

So what is poetry, if not lineated sentences? What makes a poem, a poem?

Poetry is an attempt to uncover deeper truths about the human experience.

Poetry is an attempt to uncover deeper truths about the human experience. (This is true even if the poem is written from the perspective of a marble or a mouse.) Even poems written with the express purpose of humor or entertainment will, in some way, strike at the heart of what it means to be alive.

Paradoxically, the best way for a poem to do this is to find the universal in the particular. In other words, poets don’t do themselves any favors by making grand, sweeping statements about the world; nor is it wise to write a poem that’s vague, abstracted, or highly generalized. For example:

I would hesitate to call this a poem. Yes, it’s using line breaks, and yes, it’s commenting on the human experience. But the writing is so vague, so disconnected from anything in particular, and so general that I can’t glean meaning from it. There are metaphors, but they’re not attached to anything specific. I have to insert myself generously into the text in order for it to mean anything, and in that case, I’m doing more of the poet’s work than the poet is.

It would be like an artist putting up a mirror in an art gallery and titling the mirror “Portrait.” A nice sentiment, but ultimately lazy, and any sort of artful interpretation requires the audience to do more than the artist. Maybe this is postpostpostpostpostpost-modernism, or whatever. But it isn’t poetry.

What is Poetry at the Personal Level?

Two things are true:

1. Poetry is the oldest form of literature: it has its own rules and requirements, a highly expansive canon, and countless historical movements, each of which have expanded the possibilities of the artform.
2. Poetry is a highly individual form of literature: it means something different to everyone who writes and reads it.

The definition of poetry differs for each poet. This is because poetry is, above all, a reflection of our humanity. We share this humanity with one another, yet we each experience it in our own unique way. While I can answer “what is poetry” as a poet and an academic, I cannot answer what poetry is for you.

Poetry is, above all, a reflection of our humanity.

Every poet embarks on their own unique journey of poetry. I came to the art form when I was a teenager. For me, poetry was liberatory. Here was a means of self-expression that tethered me to the Earth. I grew up queer in a less-than-tolerant society, surrounded by people who didn’t know how to help me (or were actively against me), overwhelmed with feelings and anxieties that no one could create space for.

Poetry created that space for me. Reading the works of other queer poets made me feel significantly less alone in my experiences, and I felt empowered to write my own experiences into poetry, too, even if the poems themselves weren’t that good.

Believe me: they weren’t good. I’ll occasionally stumble on something I wrote when I was 16, and my entire body winces. Of course, this is because I’ve since turned poetry into a career choice, so I’m quite particular about what a good poem is and isn’t. I sympathize with what I was going through as a teenager, but it’s still poetry I wrote, and the poetry is Not That Good.

My point is, I define poetry in this way:

An exploration of emotion, crystalized in language, that reflects and refracts the poet’s individual experiences.

Your poetry definition will differ, and it will differ based on the journey you’ve taken through poetry. In fact, your definition might completely disagree with mine. You might even think the not-poems I shared are actually poems. That’s great. In the same way that poetic movements have disagreed with each other, so, too, will poets disagree on what a poem is and isn’t.

The great thing about poetry is, two definitions completely at odds with each other will both be true.

The great thing about poetry is, two definitions completely at odds with each other will both be true. The goal, then, is to define and redefine poetry for yourself, and to write in pursuit of that poetry definition. Hopefully, the resources throughout this article help make that possible.

Quotes About Poetry

Before we continue, it’s helpful to hear how other poets have defined poetry for themselves. Here are some quotes about poetry to move, inspire, and challenge you.

• “Poems are moments’ monuments.” —Sylvia Plath
• “Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” —Carl Sandburg
• “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” —T. S. Eliot
• “Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.” —Adrienne Rich
• “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” —Rita Dove
• “I would define, in brief, the poetry of words, as the rhythmical creation of beauty.” —Edgar Allan Poe
• “Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.” —Plato
• “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” —William Wordsworth
• “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” —William Butler Yeats
• “Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.” —Paul Engle
• “Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.” —Thomas Hardy
• “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” —Emily Dickinson
• “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” —Percy Bysshe Shelley
• “Poetry is man’s rebellion against being what he is.” —James Branch Cabell
• “Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.” —Lucille Clifton
• “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought, and the thought has found words.” —Robert Frost

And, here’s a longer definition of poetry that I personally deeply enjoy. Retrieved here.

[you know how, when you’re a young kid, your parents take you to visit a lake, and you’re doing all that fun young kid stuff like cannonballs off the dock, digging your toes into the mud, pretending to be a mermaid or a manatee or submarine captain? when suddenly the clouds that had covered the sun move aside, and the surface of the lake is touched everywhere with bright gold flecks of light, and you stop what you’re doing to stare in awe at something you’d never realized before was so heart-wrenchingly beautiful? and the moment is gone as quick as it came, you’re right back to splashing water at one of your siblings, but that night, after showers and dinner and climbing into bed, just before you fall asleep, the image of the sun-kissed lake returns to you, hazy with your almost-dreaming but still so warm and striking? poetry is the written act of recognizing the way the light touches the water and the way that you looking at this changes you]

What is Poetry: Getting Into the Weeds of Craft

Hopefully, you now have at least an idea of what makes a poem, a poem. So let’s dig a bit deeper into the artform. What are the craft tools and techniques that poets use to make good poetry? How do poets achieve their poems?

“Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem.” —Anne Sexton

The Fundamentals of Poetry

Different poetic movements have emphasized different ideas and craft techniques. For example, the Modernists emphasized imagery and symbolism as a means of conveying our core experiences. (The poet William Carlos Williams once said “no ideas but in things.”) The Romantics, by contrast, concerned themselves with nature, imagination, and the value of emotion over intellect to strike at the truth of mankind’s existence.

Both eras produced excellent poetry that move readers to this day. So we can’t exactly emphasize one craft technique over another.

Nonetheless, here are some of the basic craft tools poets have at their disposal. Poets both classic and contemporary employ these techniques to achieve their vision for their work:

• Concrete language: A poem can be visualized and felt in the brain. Poets make this possible by using concrete language and imagery. Poems can certainly have abstract language—words like “soul,” “God,” “Capitalism,” “sadness,” etc.—but a poem tends to be more evocative if it explores those concepts in concrete language.
• Similes, metaphors, and analogies: Things are like other things. Poets know this. Good poetry will often make surprising and unexpected connections, using these particular literary devices to reshape how we see the world.
• Concision: Not a word is wasted in a poem. Poetry strikes at the heart of something in the fewest words possible, and this economy of language is essential to making a poem powerful and moving.
• The “Show, Don’t Tell” rule: A poem doesn’t tell me thoughts and feelings, it shows me through concrete, specific language. By following this rule, poems can create embodied experiences, or transmit the true feeling of what it means to be alive.
• Musicality and word play: Language is the poet’s sandbox, and a good poem will often incorporate play with sound and words. But don’t assume these tools are all fun and jest: good sound and wordplay can certainly surprise and move the reader.
• A sense of transformation: A good poem “takes a leap.” The poem will end somewhere completely different than where it began, or even take a journey back to where it started, yet still radically transformed.
• Interplay with form: A poem is improved by the form it’s written in. In fact, a poem’s form and language are inextricably intertwined: change the form, and you change the meaning with it. Formal considerations include rhyme, meter, line lengths, stanza lengths, and whether the poem is written in free verse or in a specific poetry form.

There are many more tools and techniques than what we’ve listed here, but these topics feel universal to poets, especially contemporary ones. If you’re interested in getting in the weeds, check out our article on poetic devices:

https://writers.com/literary-devices-in-poetry

Poetry as Exploration into Language

Something I love about poetry is its rapt attention to language. I’ve often found that words know more than I do, and if I listen to them closely, they’ll tell me exactly where I need to go.

This happens on a few levels:

• Musically: How might the sounds of one word suggest the sounds of the words around it? Poets might employ consonance, assonance, euphony, cacophony, or even meter, end rhyme, or internal rhyme to improve the feel of the poem’s sound.
• Semantically: Poets attuned to the possibilities of language will employ words that have double or multiple meanings. They might know which word is the most surprising and unexpected to use, which word is the most urgent, which is the most humorous, and which words not to use at all.
• Formally: A poem’s meaning is complemented by its form. How might a poem’s meaning be altered as a sonnet versus, say, a villanelle? Or, more granularly, how might using a line or stanza break on a certain word emphasize that word? The line as a whole?
• Unconsciously: Poets often can’t explain the decisions they made in service of the poem. Those decisions sometimes happen unconsciously, or in a state of negative capability. But the more you read and write poetry and become attuned to language, the more you’re likely to make bold, powerful decisions in your work, even if you don’t yet understand them.

Let’s look at a case study. If you’ve paid any attention to the landscape of contemporary poetry, you might have noticed that few poets employ a rhyme scheme in their work. In fact, ask a few poets about rhyme, and you’re bound to hear someone say that rhyme schemes are too restrictive, they make for bad or unserious poetry, etc.

I don’t believe those things to be inherently true. But I do believe that poets sometimes shoehorn rhymes into their work. They manage to pull off the rhyme scheme, but they’ve effectively dampened the quality of the poem’s language, opting for the less impactful word and altering the poem’s mood.

The solution, if the poet desires a rhyme scheme, is to listen to the possibilities of language. Let’s say you’re trying to rhyme with the word “flight.” There are a lot of words that rhyme with “flight,” to the point that a rhyming dictionary might just overwhelm you. So now you have to start thinking about language at the semantic and unconscious level. Semantically, “flight” might be in opposition to “fight,” “tight,” “alight”; its meaning might be complicated or expanded upon by “night,” “write,” plight,” and so on.

By rhyming words together, you are automatically putting them in conversation. One tip I like to give poets is to just look at the end words of their lines. Can the meaning of the poem be gleaned just by the progression of those end words?

And so what decision should the rhyming poet make? They need to listen closely to language to find the answer, which is triangulated between the sounds of words, their meanings, and what the poet’s unconscious guides them towards. This takes patient, careful attention; it’s not a decision that can just be made and moved on from.

Even if you don’t write rhyming poetry, this close attention to language is an essential skill to hone in your work. Good poetry writing is rarely easy, but patience and careful observation will take the poet far in their work.

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.” – W. H. Auden

Poetry as Expansion of Language

Poetry is a sandbox for language. It is where words are used at their most innovative, where language is stretched and expanded, possibly even tortured into new possibilities. Any writer will tell you about how hard it is to get words to tell the truth. Poetry is often a site of truthfulness.

This is not to say that prose can’t tell the truth, or that prose writers don’t also innovate and expand the possibilities of language. But when prose does this, it’s employing the skills and techniques that poets use to craft good poetry.

Innovation in poetry happens at the levels defined above: musically, semantically, formally, and unconsciously. Within those levels, poets are looking for new ways to make language sing, to expand the meanings and usages of words, to push the boundaries of what language can accomplish, and to strike at the heart of what it means to be alive, which is never an easy feat.

Sometimes, poets end up creating new forms of poetry, like Terrance Hayes did with The Golden Shovel. The great thing about poetry is that we can create our own containers before filling them with words, and innovating at the formal level helps us juxtapose language against itself in new and transformative ways.

Other times, poets end up coining new words and phrases, like the 1,700-odd additions Shakespeare made to the English lexicon.

“Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.” —Yevgeny Yevtushenko

As you embark on your poetry journey, you’ll find a poem’s possibilities more exciting and less daunting over time. Eventually you, too, will start tinkering with new ways to say what you need to say. Learning the ropes of poetry helps with this, but it also happens naturally, as poets are keenly attuned to language unlike the practitioners of any other profession.

Poems About Poetry Writing: The Ars Poetica

Because poets can write about anything, they’re bound to write about poetry as well. In fact, there’s a genre dedicated to poems about poetry writing—the ars poetica (Latin: “art of poetry”).

Here’s an ars poetica that always moves me when I read it: “Ars Poetica” by Archibald MacLeish

Hopefully this ars poetica’s poetry definitions inspire your writing. If not, here are some other ars poetica examples that might inspire you:

• “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe” by Elizabeth Alexander
• “What Do You Believe A Poem Shd Do?” By Ntozake Shange
• “Ars Poetica” by Horace
• “Ars Poetica?” by Czesław Miłosz
• “The Bear” by Galway Kinnell
• “What He Thought” by Heather McHugh

Helping you define poetry for yourself

Throughout this article, we’ve answered “what is poetry?” From a variety of angles: the formal, philosophical, and personal; the craft elements that make a good poem; and dozens of quotes and poems that answer this oft-spoken question. Every poet defines poetry differently, and so will every article on the internet.

Are these all correct definitions? How can poetry be all of these things at once? To answer this, I would have to wax poetic about what “correct” really means, and about poetry’s multifaceted, incessantly ineffable nature. But none of those things will be helpful here. What matters much more is this: How do you define poetry?

This is a question that can easily take a lifetime to answer. Arguably, a poet’s work is their answer to the question.

Nonetheless, whether you’re a seasoned poet or new to writing in verse, defining poetry for yourself might help you refine your poetics or figure out how you want to think about poetry. The many poetry definitions we’ve provided are all expansive in their own way, pinpointing what makes a poem while giving poetry infinite space to expand.

I want you to think about a few things. Maybe even journal about these questions, and see what arises.

1. What are some poems that have moved you, shifted your perspective, or moved you deeply?
2. Why did those poems move you deeply? Can you point to experiences within the text that did so? Or was it the overall poem that left you in awe? (Both are possible!)
3. What do those poems have in common? Think about this laterally. If they have entirely different forms, subject matter, and craft elements, zoom out to make those connections. Maybe each poem changed your view of the world, taught you something about yourself, or surprised you at a lyrical or musical level. But there are plenty of other ways a poem can move you—again, journal about it!
4. Think about poems that you’ve written, if you’ve written any. What did you enjoy about the process? What challenged you? Did you feel light afterwards, like something had been untangled in your chest, or perhaps the opposite? How did writing poetry free you? What did it communicate that prose couldn’t?
5. Try defining poetry by defining its opposite. Not prose, which is simply a continuation of language’s possibilities, but the opposite of poetry, which is no poetry. What would language be missing if it didn’t have poetry? What would you be missing if you didn’t have poetry?

Spend some time on these questions. You might stumble into a working definition of poetry for yourself, or you might find more questions to answer. If you really want to be bold, answer these questions in your own ars poetica!

In any case, I’d love to hear how you define poetry for yourself. Share your poetry definition in the comments!

What is Poetry: Further Resources on Poetry Writing

Here are some guides on writing and reading a poem to help further your poetry craft.

• Becoming a Poet: Learn to Write Poetry!
• How to Write a Poem
• On Starting a Poem
• How to Read Poetry (Like a Poet!)
• What is Form in Poetry?

Explore the Possibilities of Poetry at Writers.com

The best place to explore poetry is in a course at Writers.com. Take a look at our upcoming online poetry workshops, where you’ll receive expert guidance and feedback on the craft of poetry writing.