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The Poetry issue

The Shape of the Void: Toward a Definition of Poetry

“Poetry leaves something out,” our columnist Elisa Gabbert says. But that’s hardly the extent of it.

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By Elisa Gabbert

I once heard a student say poetry is language that’s “coherent enough.” I love a definition this ambiguous. It’s both helpful (there’s a limit to coherence, and the limit is aesthetic) and unhelpful (enough for what, or whom?). It reminds me of a dictionary entry for “detritus” that I copied down in a notebook: “the pieces that are left when something breaks, falls apart, is destroyed, etc.” That seemed so artfully vague to me, so uncharacteristically casual for a dictionary. It has a quality of distraction, of trailing off, of suggesting you already know what detritus means. Part of me resists the question of what poetry is, or resists the answer — you already know what it means.

But let’s answer it anyway, starting with the obvious: If the words have rhyme and meter, it’s poetry. Nonwords with rhyme and meter, as in “Jabberwocky,” also are poetry. And since words in aggregate have at least some rhyme and rhythm, which lines on the page accentuate, any words composed in lines are poetry. There’s something to be said for the obvious. Virginia Woolf wrote of E.M. Forster: “He says the simple things that clever people don’t say; I find him the best of critics for that reason. Suddenly out comes the obvious thing one has overlooked.”

Is there much else? I think so. I think poetry leaves something out. All texts leave something out, of course — otherwise they’d be infinite — but most of the time, more is left out of a poem. Verse, by forcing more white space on the page, is constantly reminding you of what’s not there. This absence of something, this hyper-present absence, is why prose poems take up less space than other prose forms; the longer they get, the less they feel like poems. It’s why fragments are automatically poetic: Erasure turns prose into poems. It’s why any text that’s alluringly cryptic or elusive — a road sign, assembly instructions — is described as poetic. The poetic is not merely beauty in language, but beauty in incoherence, in resistance to common sense. The missingness of poetry slows readers down, making them search for what can’t be found. The encounter is almost inherently frustrating, as though one could not possibly pay enough attention. This is useful: Frustration is erotic.

“What is poetry?” is not the same question, quite, as “What is a poem?” How many poems did Emily Dickinson write? It depends what you count. In “Writing in Time,” the scholar Marta Werner writes, of Dickinson’s so-called Master letters, “At their most fundamental, ontological level, we don’t know what they are.” Perhaps my favorite poem of Dickinson’s is not, perhaps, a poem — it’s an odd bit of verse in the form of a letter to her sister-in-law, ending with the loveliest, slantest of rhymes: “Be Sue, while/I am Emily —/Be next, what/you have ever/been, Infinity.” Are the “breaks” really breaks? The letter is written on a small, narrow card; the words go almost to the edge of the paper. I think, too, of Rilke’s letters, which often read like poems. In 1925, he wrote to his Polish translator: “We are the bees of the Invisible. We wildly gather the honey of the visible, in order to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.” In these letter-poems, poetry reveals itself as more a mode of writing, a mode of thinking, even a mode of being , than a genre. The poem is not the only unit of poetry; poetic lines in isolation are still poetry. The poem is a vessel; poetry is liquid.

From time to time I’m asked, with bewilderment or derision, if this or that poem isn’t just “prose chopped into lines.” This idea of the free verse poem as “chopped” prose comes from Ezra Pound via Marjorie Perloff, who quotes Pound in her influential essay “The Linear Fallacy,” published in 1981. The essay encourages an oddly suspicious, even paranoid reading of most free verse as phony poetry, as prose in costume. The line, in Perloff’s view, in these ersatz poems, is a “surface device,” a “gimmick.” She removes all the breaks from a C.K. Williams poem to make the case that a stanza without the intentional carriage returns is merely a paragraph.

I find this baffling — as if chopping up prose has no effect. It does have an effect, the way putting more panes in a window changes the view. The architect Christopher Alexander thought big plate glass windows were a mistake, because “they alienate us from the view”: “The smaller the windows are, and the smaller the panes are, the more intensely windows help connect us with what is on the other side. This is an important paradox.” To state the Forsterian obvious again, adding breaks to a paragraph is not always going to make an interesting poem — but most poets don’t write that way. They write in the line , in the company of the void. That changes how you write — and more profoundly, how you think, and even how you are, your mode of being. When you write in the line, there is always an awareness of the mystery, of what is left out. This is why, I suppose, poems can be so confounding. Empty space on the page, that absence of language, provides no clues. But it doesn’t communicate nothing — rather, it communicates nothing . It speaks void, it telegraphs mystery.

By “mystery” I don’t mean metaphor or disguise. Poetry doesn’t, or shouldn’t, achieve mystery only by hiding the known, or translating the known into other, less familiar language. The mystery is unknowing, the unknown — as in Jennifer Huang’s “Departure”: “The things I don’t know have stayed/In this home.” The mystery is the missing mountain in Shane McCrae’s “The Butterflies the Mountain and the Lake”:

the / Butterflies monarch butterflies huge swarms they Migrate and as they migrate south as they Cross Lake Superior instead of flying

South straight across they fly South over the water then fly east still over the water then fly south again / And now biologists believe they turn to avoid a mountain

That disappeared millennia ago.

The missing mountain is still there. As for what is on the page, the language that changes the shape of the void, I’m of the opinion it can be almost anything. One of my favorite books that no one has heard of is “Survey Says!,” by Nathan Austin. It’s just a list of guesses ventured by contestants on “Family Feud,” arranged, most ingeniously, in alphabetical order by their second letter, so you get sequences like this: “A bra. Abraham Lincoln. A building. Scaffolding. Scalpel. A car. A card game. A cat. A cat. Ice cream. Ice cream. Ice cream. Ice cream.” We get the answers; the questions are missing. “Get a manicure. Get a toupee. Get drunk. Retirement fund. Get out of bed. Get ready! Let’s go with manuals. Get sick in there. Let’s say a pet. Let’s say shoes. Bette Davis.” The poetry seems to perform hypnosis, the found rhymes and assonance and anaphora enacting an enchantment, a bewitchery; it seems to be giving subconscious advice. Get ready! You must change your life.

Elisa Gabbert is the author of five collections of poetry, essays and criticism, most recently “ The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays .” Her On Poetry columns appear four times a year.

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5 Writers Who Blur the Boundary Between Poetry and Essay

"poets are the hoarders of the literary world".

There is a Bernadette Mayer writing exercise that suggests attempting to flood the brain with ideas from varying sources, then writing it all down, without looking at the page or what spreads over it. I have attempted this exercise multiple times, with multiple sources, and what I love about it—along with many of Mayer’s other 81 prompts—is that what comes out can literally take any form. The form is not dictated by the content I read, nor the rules of the exercise. The information I collect prior to writing may be entirely disparate, seemingly unrelated, but through the writing, it begins to take shape, and links are found. In the process of communicating information in a lyric way, barriers to form withheld, I am able to develop a richer portrait of what thinking really looks like.

I heard someone say once that poets are the hoarders of the literary world: collectors of facts, dates, quotes, newspaper headlines, ticket stubs, and love letters. Indeed, another of Mayer’s prompts is to keep a diary, or diar ies , of such useful things. As these journal pages begin to overflow, content spilling over the borders, the writing becomes something we might not always call a poem. Reflecting on his poetry collection The Little Edges and a book of essays The Service Porch , both of which appeared in 2016, poet and critic Fred Moten said , “The line between the criticism and the poetry is sort of blurry. I got some stuff in the poems that probably could’ve been collected with the essays.”

There is a long-standing tradition of poets who have refused genre, or reinvented it, and who continue to push the boundaries of form. Here are five, but just a cursory glance into any of their work will lead you to uncover many more.

Jenny Boully

The first essay in Jenny Boully’s latest collection Betwixt and Between: Essays on the Writing Life, published last month, is a journey into two illusive linguistic temporalities: “the future imagined and the past imagined. ” By positioning the reader in a space of hypothesis, Boully tests the limits of memory and lived experience, never quite allowing her reader to land on stable footing. With this linguistic trick, a redefinition of what is the personal begins to emerge.

Throughout her work, Boully is interested in reorienting the role of the reader from passive to participatory and reorienting the structure of the text from chronological to sensory. In an introduction to Boully’s work, Mary Jo Bang writes , “She uses form in a way that undercuts our every expectation based on previous encounters with poetry.” It’s no wonder that excerpts from her first book The Body , written as footnotes to an imaginary text, were included in both John D’Agata’s  The Next American Essay and The Best American Poetry 2002 .

Dodie Bellamy

Dodie Bellamy is a seamstress of language. Her work stretches the definitions of narrative writing by incorporating literary appropriation, cut-ups, collage, and détournement, or the act of turning a recognizable cultural product on itself, a technique developed by the Situationist International in the 1950s. Her poetic “cunt ups” take works of the traditional poetic canon and reinvent them with a contemporary feminist voice, directly splicing the historic masculine texts with pornographic imagery. The 2013 collection Cunt Norton employs the original language of 33 canonical poets, twisting them into erotic poems as an act of love for her predecessors. “These patriarchal voices that threatened to erase me—of course I love them as well,” Bellamy wrote of the work . Her experiments began to take a more prosaic form as she desired further space for her content. “I was writing linked poems that kept getting longer and more narrative,” she said in an interview .

Due to her inventive and often hysterical treatment of language, Bellamy’s voice is engaging on any topic. The themes she tackles in her collected essays When the Sick Rule the World range from the gentrification of San Francisco, her experiences with a women’s writing group and a moving tribute to the late equally inventive writer Kathy Acker, in the form of a catalogue of the contents of her wardrobe.

Claudia Rankine

When Claudia Rankine’s Citizen won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the judges’ citation read, in part, “It’s not (just) poetry.” The prose-poetry hybrid is a current throughout her work; her previous poetry title Don’t Let Me Be Lonely  was described, alongside Citizen , as “lyric essays” in the  The New York Review of Books . Rankine’s work uses investigative tools of poetry to probe what it means to be human and to encourage readers to examine their personal responsibility to others. Through experiments in form, she highlights the dangers of lazy classification of people and experiences; her words in any medium provoke self-reflection.

In Citizen , a 2015 essay on Serena Williams finds a comfortable home alongside prose and list poems. With her employment of the second person throughout the collection, Rankine prompts her readers to enter into the very experiences she is describing, whether they are wholly familiar or not. As such, her approach is in equal measure confrontational and humanizing.

David Rattray

When the poet, critic, and renowned translator David Rattray passed away at the age of 57 in 1993, the experimental writer Lynn Tillman wrote , “He swept us away also with his ‘bad attitude,’ his insubordination to authority and to the authority of what he knew.” This was true not just in the manner he lived his life, but also how he captured life in text. A principle translator of Antonin Artaud, Rattray’s own poems display a diary-like quality: they are grand narrations stuffed full of dates, places, people.

A collection of essays and stories exploring his relationship to close friends, grief, drugs, travel, and literature called How I Became One of the Invisible was put together by Chris Kraus just before his death. Through narratives that are at once breathless and directional, and full of poetic references and quotes, Rattray reveals his deep feelings for those with whom he shared his life. “He believed people were gems, precious, and treated them accordingly,” Betsy Sussler wrote , following his passing. And so too did he treat his words, allowing us to enter into his world imbued with sensitivity.

Maggie Nelson

Asked in an interview by Emily Gould as to how she decides on which genre(s) she will employ when writing a new book, Maggie Nelson replied , “Genre, for me, is determined by the unfolding of my interests, which is unknowable at a projects’ start.” Her defiance of category is not only evident in her bibliography, but in the bibliography of each book which makes it up. Bluets , which began as an investigation into the color blue and its varying manifestations throughout history, became a book of prose poems. The Art of Cruelty , a personal reflection on the employment of violence in art, became a book of academic criticism. Begun as a work of criticism, The Argonauts became a personal memoir, with its background research spilling, literally, into the margins. “I find my way to the right tone, idiom, form or set of subjects as I bumble along,” Nelson says.

It is her very adaptability of form and expression that has become one of her signature attributes, despite the literary world’s continued insistence on writerly classification, and in turn mimics the fluidity of her subjects. Hilton Als writes , “It’s Nelson’s articulation of her many selves . . . that makes her readers feel hopeful.”

Listen: Claudia Rankine talks to Paul Holdengräber about objectifying the moment, investigating a subject, and accidental stalking.

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How to write a poetry essay

• August 26, 2023

Whether you love literature or are just curious, this guide will help you understand, enjoy, and talk about poetry. So, let’s start exploring the world of lines and symbols, where each one tells a story to discover.

Here are the steps on writing a poetry essay.

Choose a poem

The first step is, of course, to choose a poem to write your essay . 

It should be one that you find interesting, thought-provoking, or emotionally resonant. It’s important to select a poem that you can engage with and analyze effectively.

• Choose a poem that genuinely captures your interest. Look for poems that evoke emotions, thoughts, or curiosity when you read them.
• Consider the themes addressed in the poem. It should offer ample material for analysis.

When choosing a poem

So for this guide, let’s choose Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for Death.” You’ll see a short excerpt of this poem for your understanding. 

Poem example for poetry essay

Because i couldn not stop for Death by Emily Dickinson

       Because I could not stop for Death –        He kindly stopped for me –        The Carriage held but just Ourselves –        And Immortality.        We slowly drove – He knew no haste        And I had put away        My labor and my leisure too,        For His Civility –        We passed the School, where Children strove        At Recess – in the Ring –        We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –        We passed the Setting Sun –        The poem continues....

This poem is intriguing due to its exploration of mortality, the afterlife, and eternity. The imagery and language in the poem provide ample material for analysis, making it a suitable choice for a comprehensive essay.

After carefully choosing the poem that interests you, understanding the poem is the biggest key to writing an effective and nice poetry essay.

Understand the poem

Reading the poem several times to grasp its meaning is the most important part of a good analysis. You must first analyze the structure, rhyme scheme , meter and literary tools used in the poem.

For a solid understanding, you should:

• Read the poem multiple times to familiarize yourself with its content. Each reading may reveal new insights.
• Identify the central themes or messages the poem conveys.
• Study the rhyme scheme and meter (rhythmic pattern) of the poem.
• Consider how the structure, including its stanzas, lines, and breaks, contributes to the poem's meaning and impact.

For example

Remember, understanding the poem thoroughly is the foundation for a well-informed analysis. Take your time to grasp the poem’s various elements before moving on to the next steps in your essay.

Now that we have a clear understanding of the poem, let’s move into writing the introduction. 

Write a catchy introduction

• Begin with an attention-grabbing hook sentence that piques the reader's interest.
• Provide the necessary information about the poem and its author. Mention the poet's name and title of the poem.
• Offer some context about the poem's time period, literary movement, or cultural influences.
• Present your thesis statement , which outlines the main argument or focus of your essay.

Poetry essay introduction example

Introduction

Thesis statement for poetry essays

A thesis statement is a clear and concise sentence or two that presents the main argument or point of your essay . It provides a roadmap for your reader, outlining what they can expect to find in your essay.

In the case of a poetry essay, your thesis statement should capture the central message, themes, or techniques you’ll be discussing in relation to the poem.

Why is the thesis important for a poetry essay?

By reading your thesis statement, your audience should have a clear idea of what to expect from your poem analysis essay.

When creating a thesis statement, keep these in mind: 

• Start by identifying the key elements of the poem that you want to discuss. These could be themes, literary devices, emotions conveyed, or the poet's intentions.
• Based on the key elements you've identified, formulate a central argument that encapsulates your main analysis. What is the poem trying to convey? What are you trying to say about the poem?
• Your thesis should be specific and focused. Avoid vague or broad statements. Instead, provide a clear direction for your analysis.

Poetry essasy thesis statement example

....(introduction starts) ....(introduction continues) ....(introduction continues) In "Because I could not stop for Death," Emily Dickinson employs vivid imagery, personification, and an unconventional perspective on mortality to explore the transcendence of death and the eternity of the soul. Thesis statement, which is usually the last sentence of your introduction

Analyze language and imagery

Language and image analysis in poetry involves a close examination of the words, phrases and literary devices used by the poet. In this step you must uncover the deeper layers of meaning, emotion and sensory experiences conveyed by the poet’s choice of language and imagery.

Why language and imagery?

• Start by identifying and listing the literary devices present in the poem. These could include metaphors, similes, personification, symbolism, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and more.
• For each identified device, explain its significance. How does it contribute to the poem's meaning, mood, or tone?
• Analyze how the literary devices interact with the context of the poem. How do they relate to the themes, characters, or situations presented in the poem?
• Discuss how the use of specific language and imagery influences the reader's emotional response and understanding of the poem.

Continuing with Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death,” let’s analyze the use of imagery:

Language and imagery analysis example

Lines chosen for analysis

Discuss themes in body paragraphs

Exploring themes helps you grasp the deeper meaning of the poem and connect it to broader human experiences. Understanding the themes allows you to uncover what the poet is attempting to convey and how the poem relates to readers on a universal level.

In this step, you will likely dedicate multiple body paragraphs to the analysis of various aspects of language and imagery. Each body paragraph should focus on a specific literary device, phrase, or aspect of language and imagery.

Here’s how you can structure the body paragraphs.

Poetry essay body paragraphs example

Body Paragraph 1: Identify and Explain Literary Devices

Body Paragraph 2: Context and Interaction with Themes

Body Paragraph 3: Reader's emotional response and understanding

Provide evidence from the poem

Providing evidence involves quoting specific lines or stanzas from the poem to support the points you’re making in your analysis. These quotes serve as concrete examples that demonstrate how the poet uses language, imagery, or literary devices to convey specific meanings or emotions.

• Select lines or stanzas from the poem that directly relate to the point you're making in your analysis.
• Introduce each quote with context, explaining the significance of the lines and how they contribute to your analysis.
• Use quotation marks to indicate that you're using the poet's language.
• After providing the quote, interpret its meaning. Explain how the language, imagery, or devices used in the quoted lines contribute to your analysis.

Providing evidence example

In your essay, you should include several quotes and interpret them to reinforce your points. Quoting specific lines from the poem allows you to showcase the poet’s language while demonstrating how these lines contribute to the poem’s overall expression.

Write a conclusion

Conclusion paragraph is the last sentence of your poem analysis essay. It reinforces your thesis statement and emphasizes your insights.

Additionally, the conclusion offers a chance to provide a final thought that leaves a lasting impression on the reader. In your conclusion, make sure to:

• Start by rephrasing your thesis statement. Remind the reader of the main argument you've made in your essay.
• Provide a concise summary of the main points. Avoid introducing new information; focus on the key ideas.
• Discuss the broader significance or implications. How does the poem's message relate to readers beyond its specific context?
• End with a thoughtful reflection, observation, or question that leaves the reader with something to ponder.

Poetry essay conclusion example

In your essay, the conclusion serves as a final opportunity to leave a strong impression on the reader by summarizing your analysis and offering insights into the poem’s broader significance.

Now, it’s time to double check what you’ve written.

Proofread and revise your essay

Edit your essay for clarity, coherence, tense selection , correct headings , etc. Ensure that your ideas flow logically and your analysis is well-supported. Remember, a poetry essay is an opportunity to delve into the nuances of a poem’s language, themes, and emotions.

• Review each paragraph to ensure ideas flow logically from one to the next.
• Check for grammar and punctuation errors.
• Verify that your evidence from the poem is accurately quoted and explained.
• Make sure your language is clear and effectively conveys your analysis.

By proofreading and revising, you can refine your essay, improving its readability and ensuring that your insights are communicated accurately.

So this was the last part, you’re now ready to write your first poem analysis (poetry) essay. 

Frequently Asked Questions

What should i include in the introduction of a poetry essay.

In the introduction, provide background information about the poem and poet. Include the poem’s title, publication date, and any relevant context that helps readers understand its significance.

Can I include my emotional responses in a poetry essay?

Yes, you can discuss your emotional responses, but ensure they are supported by your analysis of the poem’s literary elements. Avoid focusing solely on personal feelings.

Is it important to understand the poet's background when writing a poetry essay?

While it can provide context, your focus should be on analyzing the poem itself. If the poet’s background is relevant to the poem’s interpretation, mention it briefly.

What's the best way to conclude a poetry essay?

In the conclusion, summarize your main points and tie them together. Offer insights into the poem’s broader significance, implications, or lasting impact.

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Writing About Poetry

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This section covers the basics of how to write about poetry, including why it is done, what you should know, and what you can write about.

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 .

In literary nonfiction, no form is quite as complicated as the lyric essay. Lyrical essays explore the elements of poetry and creative nonfiction in complex and experimental ways, combining the subject matter of autobiography with poetry’s figurative devices and musicality of language.

For both poets and creative nonfiction writers, lyric essays are a gold standard of experimentation and language, but conquering the form takes lots of practice. What is a lyric essay, and how do you write one? Let’s break down this challenging CNF form, with lyric essay examples, before examining how you might approach it yourself.

Want to explore the lyric essay further? See our lyric essay writing course with instructor Gretchen Clark. 

What is a lyric essay?

The lyric essay combines the autobiographical information of a personal essay with the figurative language, forms, and experimentations of poetry. In the lyric essay, the rules of both poetry and prose become suggestions, because the form of the essay is constantly changing, adapting to the needs, ideas, and consciousness of the writer.

Lyric essay definition: The lyric essay combines autobiographical writing with the figurative language, forms, and experimentations of poetry.

Lyric essays are typically written in a poetic prose style . (We’ll expand on the difference between prose poetry and lyric essay shortly.) Lyric essays employ many of the poetic devices that poets use, including devices of repetition and rhetorical devices in literature.

That said, there are few conventions for the lyric essay, other than to experiment, experiment, experiment. While the form itself is an essay, there’s no reason you can’t break the bounds of expression.

One tactic, for example, is to incorporate poetry into the essay itself. You might start your essay with a normal paragraph, then describe something specific through a sonnet or villanelle , then express a different idea through a POV shift, a list, or some other form. Lyric essays can also borrow from the braided essay, the hermit crab, and other forms of creative nonfiction .

In truth, there’s very little that unifies all lyric essays, because they’re so wildly experimental. They’re also a bit tricky to define—the line between a lyric essay and the prose poem, in particular, is very hazy.

Rather than apply a one-size-fits-all definition for the lyric essay, which doesn’t exist, let’s pay close attention to how lyric essayists approach the open-ended form.

There are few conventions for the lyric essay, other than to experiment, experiment, experiment

Personal essay vs. lyric essay: An example of each

At its simplest, the lyric essay’s prose style is different from that of the personal essay, or other forms of creative nonfiction.

Personal essay example

Here are the opening two paragraphs from Beth Ann Fennelly’s personal essay “ I Survived the Blizzard of ’79. ”

“We didn’t question. Or complain. It wouldn’t have occurred to us, and it wouldn’t have helped. I was eight. Julie was ten.

We didn’t know yet that this blizzard would earn itself a moniker that would be silk-screened on T-shirts. We would own such a shirt, which extended its tenure in our house as a rag for polishing silver.”

The prose in this personal essay excerpt is descriptive, linear, and easy to understand. Fennelly gives us the information we need to make sense of her world, as well as the foreshadow of what’s to come in her essay.

Lyric essay example

Now, take this excerpt from a lyric essay, “ Life Code ” by J. A. Knight:

“The dream goes like this: blue room of water. God light from above. Child’s fist, foot, curve, face, the arc of an eye, the symmetry of circles… and then an opening of this body—which surprised her—a movement so clean and assured and then the push towards the light like a frog or a fish.” 

The prose in Knight’s lyric essay cannot be read the same way as a personal essay might be. Here, Knight’s prose is a sort of experience—a way of exploring the dream through language as shifting and ethereal as dreams themselves. Where the personal essay transcribes experiences, the lyric essay creates them.

Where the personal essay transcribes experiences, the lyric essay creates them.

For more examples of the craft, The Seneca Review and Eastern Iowa Review both have a growing archive of lyric essays submitted to their journals. In essence, there is no form to a lyric essay—rather, form and language are experimented with interchangeably, guided only by the narrative you seek to write.

Lyric Essay Vs Prose Poem

Lyric essays are commonly confused with prose poetry . In truth, there is no clear line separating the two, and plenty of essays, including some of the lyric essay examples in this article, can also be called prose poems.

Well, what’s the difference? A prose poem, broadly defined, is a poem written in paragraphs. Unlike a traditional poem, the prose poem does not make use of line breaks: the line breaks simply occur at the end of the page. However, all other tactics of poetry are in the prose poet’s toolkit, and you can even play with poetry forms in the prose poem, such as writing the prose sonnet .

Lyric essays also blend the techniques of prose and poetry. Here are some general differences between the two:

• Lyric essays tend to be longer. A prose poem is rarely more than a page. Some lyric essays are longer than 20 pages.
• Lyric essays tend to be more experimental. One paragraph might be in prose, the next, poetry. The lyric essay might play more with forms like lists, dreams, public signs, or other types of media and text.
• Prose poems are often more stream-of-conscious. The prose poet often charts the flow of their consciousness on the page. Lyric essayists can do this, too, but there’s often a broader narrative organizing the piece, even if it’s not explicitly stated or recognizable.

The two share many similarities, too, including:

• An emphasis on language, musicality, and ambiguity.
• Rejection of “objective meaning” and the desire to set forth arguments.
• An unobstructed flow of ideas.
• Suggestiveness in thoughts and language, rather than concrete, explicit expressions.
• Surprising or unexpected juxtapositions .
• Ingenuity and play with language and form.

In short, there’s no clear dividing line between the two. Often, the label of whether a piece is a lyric essay or a prose poem is up to the writer.

Lyric Essay Examples

The following lyric essay examples are contemporary and have been previously published online. Pay attention to how the lyric essayists interweave the essay form with a poet’s attention to language, mystery, and musicality.

“Lodge: A Lyric Essay” by Emilia Phillips

Retrieved here, from Blackbird .

This lush, evocative lyric essay traverses the American landscape. The speaker reacts to this landscape finding poetry in the rundown, and seeing her own story—family trauma, religion, and the random forces that shape her childhood. Pay attention to how the essay defies conventional standards of self-expression. In between narrative paragraphs are lists, allusions, memories, and the many twists and turns that seem to accompany the narrator on their journey through Americana.

“Spiral” by Nicole Callihan

Retrieved here, from Birdcoat Quarterly . 

Notice how this gorgeous essay evolves down the spine of its central theme: the sleepless swallows. The narrator records her thoughts about the passage of time, her breast examination, her family and childhood, and the other thoughts that arise in her mind as she compares them, again and again, to the mysterious swallows who fly without sleep. This piece demonstrates how lyric essays can encompass a wide array of ideas and threads, creating a kaleidoscope of language for the reader to peer into, come away with something, peer into again, and always see something different.

“Star Stuff” by Jessica Franken

Retrieved here, from Seneca Review .

This short, imagery -driven lyric essay evokes wonder at our seeming smallness, our seeming vastness. The narrator juxtaposes different ideas for what the body can become, playing with all our senses and creating odd, surprising connections. Read this short piece a few times. Ask yourself, why are certain items linked together in the same paragraph? What is the train of thought occurring in each new sentence, each new paragraph? How does the final paragraph wrap up the lyric essay, while also leaving it open ended? There’s much to interpret in this piece, so engage with it slowly, read it over several times.

5 approaches to writing the lyric essay

This form of creative writing is tough for writers because there’s no proper formula for writing it. However, if you have a passion for imaginative forms and want to rise to the challenge, here are several different ways to write your essay.

1. Start with your narrative

Writing the lyrical essay is a lot like writing creative nonfiction: it starts with getting words on the page. Start with a simple outline of the story you’re looking to write. Focus on the main plot points and what you want to explore, then highlight the ideas or events that will be most difficult for you to write about. Often, the lyrical form offers the writer a new way to talk about something difficult. Where words fail, form is key. Combining difficult ideas and musicality allows you to find the right words when conventional language hasn’t worked.

Emilia Phillips’ lyric essay “ Lodge ” does exactly this, letting the story’s form emphasize its language and the narrative Phillips writes about dreams, traveling, and childhood emotions.

2. Identify moments of metaphor and figurative language

The lyric essay is liberated from form, rather than constrained by it. In a normal essay, you wouldn’t want your piece overrun by figurative language, but here, boundless metaphors are encouraged—so long as they aid your message. For some essayists, it might help to start by reimagining your story as an extended metaphor.

A great example of this is Zadie Smith’s essay “ The Lazy River ,” which uses the lazy river as an extended metaphor to criticize a certain “go with the flow” mindset.

Use extended metaphors as a base for the essay, then return to it during moments of transition or key insight. Writing this way might help ground your writing process while giving you new opportunities to play with form.

3. Investigate and braid different threads

Just like the braided essay , lyric essays can certainly braid different story lines together. If anything, the freedom to play with form makes braiding much easier and more exciting to investigate. How can you use poetic forms to braid different ideas together? Can you braid an extended metaphor with the main story? Can you separate the threads into a contrapuntal, then reunite them in prose?

A simple example of threading in lyric essay is Jane Harrington’s “ Ossein Pith .” Harrington intertwines the “you” and “I” of the story, letting each character meet only when the story explores moments of “hunger.”

Whichever threads you choose to write, use the freedom of the lyric essay to your advantage in exploring the story you’re trying to set down.

4. Revise an existing piece into a lyric essay

Some CNF writers might find it easier to write their essay, then go back and revise with the elements of poetic form and figurative language. If you choose to take this route, identify the parts of your draft that don’t seem to be working, then consider changing the form into something other than prose.

For example, you might write a story, then realize it would greatly benefit the prose if it was written using the poetic device of anaphora (a repetition device using a word or phrase at the beginning of a line or paragraph). Chen Li’s lyric essay “ Baudelaire Street ” does a great job of this, using the anaphora “I would ride past” to explore childhood memory.

When words don’t work, let the lyrical form intervene.

5. Write stream-of-conscious

Stream-of-consciousness is a writing technique in which the writer charts, word-for-word, the exact order of their unfiltered thoughts on the page.

If it isn’t obvious, this is easier said than done. We naturally think faster than we write, and we also have a tendency to filter our thoughts as we think them, to the point where many thoughts go unconsciously unnoticed. Unlearning this takes a lot of practice and skill.

Nonetheless, you might notice in the lyric essay examples we shared how the essayists followed different associations with their words, one thought flowing naturally into the next, circling around a subject rather than explicitly defining it. The stream-of-conscious technique is perfect for this kind of writing, then, because it earnestly excavates the mind, creating a kind of Rorschach test that the reader can look into, interpret, see for themselves.

This technique requires a lot of mastery, but if you’re keen on capturing your own consciousness, you may find that the lyric essay form is the perfect container to hold it in.

Closing thoughts on the lyric essay form

Creative nonfiction writers have an overt desire to engage their readers with insightful stories. When language fails, the lyrical essay comes to the rescue. Although this is a challenging form to master, practicing different forms of storytelling could pave new avenues for your next nonfiction piece. Try using one of these different ways to practice the lyric craft, and get writing your next CNF story!

[…] Sean “Writing Your Truth: Understanding the Lyric Essay.” writers.com. https://writers.com/understanding-the-lyric-essay published 19 May, 2020/ accessed 13 Oct, […]

[…] https://writers.com/understanding-the-lyric-essay […]

I agree with every factor that you have pointed out. Thank you for sharing your beautiful thoughts on this. A personal essay is writing that shares an interesting, thought-provoking, sometimes entertaining, and humorous piece that is often drawn from the writer’s personal experience and at times drawn from the current affairs of the world.

[…] been wanting to learn more about lyric essay, and this seems a natural transition from […]

thanks for sharing

Thanks so much for this. Here is an updated link to my essay Spiral: https://www.birdcoatquarterly.com/post/nicole-callihan

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6.1: What is Poetry?

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• Heather Ringo & Athena Kashyap
• City College of San Francisco via ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative

Image from Pixabay

What is Poetry?

Poetry is a condensed form of writing. As an art, it can effectively invoke a range of emotions in the reader. It can be presented in a number of forms — ranging from traditional rhymed poems such as sonnets to contemporary free verse. Poetry has always been intrinsically tied to music and many poems work with rhythm. It often brings awareness of current issues such as the state of the environment, but can also be read just for the sheer pleasure.

A poet makes the invisible visible. The invisible includes our deepest feelings and angsts, and also our joys, sorrows, and unanswered questions of being human. How is a poet able to do this? A poet uses fresh and original language , and is more interested in how the arrangement of words affects the reader rather than solely grammatical construction. The poet thinks about how words sound , the musicality within each word and also how the words come together.

Like fiction writers, poets mostly show rather than tell . They describe the scene vividly using as few words as possible and prefer to describe rather than analyze, leaving the latter to the people who read and write about poetry as you are doing in this class.

The Purpose of Poetry

If you’ve taken a composition or freshman writing course, you might recognize some familiar terms used above — summarizes, sources, persuades, ethos. These are all words you will rarely, if ever, use in reference to writing poetry. And why is that? Well, what’s the purpose of poetry? Perhaps this is not an easy question to answer. In fact, the answer might depend on time and culture. Epics such as Gilgamesh aided in memorization and preserved stories meant to be passed down orally. The British Romantics valued the pleasure derived from hearing and reading poetry. In some cultures poetry is important in ritual and religious practice. In contemporary times, many describe poetry as being a tool for self-expression.

In the excellent glossary in his book How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry , poet Edward Hirsch provides the following definition for a poem:

Poem: A made thing, a verbal construct, an event in language. The word poesis means “making;” and the oldest term for the poet means “maker.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics points out that the medieval and Renaissance poets used the word makers , as in “courtly makers,” as a precise equivalent for poets. (Hence William Dunbar’s “Lament for the Makers.”) The word poem came into English in the sixteenth century and has been with us ever since to denote a form of fabrication, a verbal composition, a made thing.

William Carlos Williams defined the poem as “a small (or large) machine made of words.” (He added that there is nothing redundant about a machine.) Wallace Stevens characterized poetry as “a revelation of words by means of the words.” In his helpful essay “What is Poetry?” linguist Roman Jakobson declared:

“Poeticity is present when the word is felt as a word and not a mere representation of the object being named or an outburst of emotion, when words and their composition, their meaning, their external and internal form, acquire a weight and value of their own instead of referring indifferently to reality.”

Ben Johnson referred to the art of poetry as “the craft of making.” The old Irish word cerd, meaning “people of the craft,” was a designation for artisans, including poets. It is cognate with the Greek kerdos , meaning “craft, craftiness.” Two basic metaphors for the art of poetry in the classical world were carpentry and weaving. “Whatsoever else it may be,” W. H. Auden said, “a poem is a verbal artifact which must be as skillfully and solidly constructed as a table or a motorcycle.”

The true poem has been crafted into a living entity. It has magical potency, ineffable spirit. There is always something mysterious and inexplicable in a poem. It is an act—an action—beyond paraphrase because what is said is always inseparable from the way it is being said. A poem creates an experience in the reader that cannot be reduced to anything else. Perhaps it exists in order to create that aesthetic experience. Octavio Paz maintained that the poet and the reader are two moments of a single reality.

Of the many ideas provided here in this definition, perhaps the one to emphasize most is that the poem is “an event in language.” It is also one of the harder to understand concepts. “A poem creates an experience in the reader that cannot be reduced to anything else,” writes Hirsch. Especially not through paraphrase. This means that in order to “experience” a poem, a reader needs to read it as it is. The poem is itself a type of virtual reality.

Jeremy Arnold, a professor of philosophy at the University of Woolamaloo in Canada, likens the poem to the “pensieve” device in the Harry Potter series: “A poem allows someone to preserve a mental experience so that an outsider can access it as if it were their own.” When coming to poetry, there may be nothing more important to understand because nothing can shape your perspective more on how to write and for what purpose. Poetry requires a reader, an audience; therefore, the poet must learn how to best engage an audience. And this engagement doesn’t happen by sharing ideas, feelings, or experiences, by telling the reader about your experiences — it happens by creating them on the page with words that evoke the senses. With images . These, then, are how the literary genres speak. Images are their muscles. Their heart. Images are poetry’s body and soul.

Choose a poem from the Poetry Foundation’s featured poems and look again at Edward Hirsh’s definition of poem. How does this poem typify his explanation? Are there any ways in which it does not? Write a short response (300 words or less) explaining how you see your selected poem in relation to Hirsch’s definition.

Video: Billy Collins, A Poet, Speaks Out

Watch Billy Collins’ audio/visual poem:

Video 6.1.1 : Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

After watching the video above, read the poem here , and click on the link below to listen to a lecture by Billy Collins on his craft and how it relates to the reader.

Contributors and Attributions

Adapted from Naming the Unnameable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations by Michelle Bonczek Evory, sourced from SUNY, CC-BY-NC-SA