What a Poem Is

Poets enjoy sharing their thoughts about what poetry is. Often they describe what makes poetry pleasurable, dangerous, elusive, moving, and/or a gospel to live by. The definitions are lofty and philosophical but also quirky and psychological. Most, of course, reveal a great deal about poets’ attitudes toward their own work.

For the playful Marianne Moore, poetry was “the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads."

For the ponderous Wordsworth, poetry was “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings... recollected in tranquility."

For the aphorist Frost: “Poetry is the renewal of words. Poetry is the dawning of an idea. Poetry is that which tends to evaporate from both prose and verse when translated. Poetry is the liberal arts."

Frost’s writing on poetry and prose resembles poetry. He recognized that the best definitions, like poems, are visual and elusive but also concise. He defined the way a poem slides and dissolves into meaning, for example, through the image of butter melting on a stove. Most impressive is his description of how the human voice is the medium through which all writing works:

“No amount of varying structure will do. Only the sound of the human voice entangled in the words is all that can save poetry from singsong, prose from itself.”

The religious and the sacred

Poetry also can be a kind of gospel or words to live by or as an effort to echo or encapsulate the sacred.

For Patrick Kavanagh, for example, poetry was a means to gain a better vantage point on the world and his own too human nature. The ending of his poem, “Auditors In,” for example, is rooted in the belief that poetry at its core can help us rise above suffering.

But satire is unfruitful prayer
Only wild shoots of pity there
And you must go inland and be
Lost in compassion’s ecstasy.
Where suffering soars in summer air
The millstone has become a star.

Auden described poetry in quasi-religious terms. He believed that the best poetry captured the human need to penetrate the secret and the sacred. Poetry was, for him, the full expression of “imaginative awe.”

In the essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging” in The Dyer’s Hand, he focuses on what he believed was poetry’s highest quality:

Whatever its actual content and overt interest, every poem is rooted in imaginative awe. Poetry can do a hundred and one things, delight, sadden, disturb, amuse instruct—it may express every possible shade of emotion, and describe every conceivable kind of event, but there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening.

The misuse of borrowed things

For those poets who find their source of creativity in conversation with other poets and poems, there is also a way of seeing poetry as part of what I call “the misuse of borrowed things.” My favorite definition of poetry might be the Talmud’s description of a properly constructed house. It is “a door to the street that lets the bustle and color of life be sounded in the courtyard.”

A poem can be a story, a dialogue, a game of language, a vision of the ineffable, the passage or memory of a moment.

It can be as small as a sigh, or a tear, or a fleeting dream or notion. It can be long as a span of history so long as it has drama.

But the important thing is that poetry tells us something about life.

Multiple realities of the moment

Poetry often captures the collision of multiple worlds together in the moment. The French poet Paul Claudel once pinned down of the meeting of opposites that poetry embraces. Order, Claudel said, offers “the pleasure of reason,” disorder “the delight of the imagination.” The poem can capture the meeting of these forces, which combine to form its “natural geographic,” its longitude and latitude, the x and y axis the poet uses to plot the verse.

The bridge to the other

The most important thing, Whitman said, is that poetry makes a bridge to the reader, who will find in it whatever catches hold.

Whitman described the poet as the noiseless, patient spider spinning its web, hoping to latch on to something separate. The poem is not a poem unless “the gossamer thread” makes a connection to the other and “the ductile anchor hold.”

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form would, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

In fact, the poem exists when the reader finds something the writer seeks to anchor, even if it is different than what the poet intended.

The connection is all that counts.

And the exact definition is not important. Because every poem redefines what a poem is.