What Is Poetry? What Makes a Poem a Poem, With Examples

Poetry is writing that uses the sound, rhythm and arrangement of words, as well as their meaning, to express feelings, ideas and experiences in a concentrated way. A poem is a single piece of poetry, usually set out in lines that the poet breaks on purpose instead of in paragraphs. Some poems rhyme and follow strict patterns. Others, called free verse, have no fixed pattern at all. This guide answers "what is poetry?" in plain English: what makes a poem a poem, what famous poets say poetry is, how it differs from prose, and the main kinds of poems.

What is a poem? A simple definition

A poem is one complete work of poetry, the way a song is one piece of music. "Poetry" is the art form, or a body of work, as in "Emily Dickinson's poetry". The word "poem" comes from the Greek poiēma, from a verb meaning "to make": a poem is built on purpose, word by word.

Most poems are written in lines, pay close attention to sound and say a lot in few words. A poem can be two lines or thousands of lines long, and it can be about anything: a war, a first kiss, a cat or a wheelbarrow.

What makes a poem a poem?

No single rule turns writing into a poem, but five features show up again and again, usually several at once.

1. Lines and line breaks

Prose runs to the edge of the page. Poetry is written in lines, and the poet decides where each one ends. A line break makes a small pause, puts weight on the last word of the line and can hold back information. When a sentence runs on from one line into the next without a pause, that is called enjambment.

William Carlos Williams built a famous poem almost entirely out of line breaks. It was first printed without a title, as poem XXII in his book Spring and All (1923), and is now known as "The Red Wheelbarrow":

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

As prose it is one plain sentence of 16 words. Broken into lines, it slows you down, and "wheel" and "barrow", "rain" and "water" become separate things to look at.

Read the first line of this example on its own, then the second.

"Back Door" (written for this guide)

I left the back door open
for you, the way I always do.

The first line sounds like a mistake. The second turns it into a kindness, and that surprise only works because of where the line breaks.

2. Sound and rhythm

Poems are made to be heard, even when you read them silently. Poets repeat sounds and arrange stressed and unstressed syllables into a beat. Here is the opening of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Bells", first printed in the November 1849 issue of a magazine, just after his death:

Hear the sledges with the bells—
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!

Say "tinkle, tinkle, tinkle" aloud and you can hear the bells. A word that sounds like what it means is onomatopoeia. "Merriment" and "melody" start with the same sound, which is alliteration. "Bells" rhymes with "foretells", and the lines bounce on a strong beat: "HOW they TIN-kle, TIN-kle, TIN-kle".

The pattern of rhymes in a poem is its rhyme scheme, and its regular beat is its meter. The best-known meter in English is iambic pentameter, the five-beat line of Shakespeare's sonnets.

3. Compression

A poet cuts every word that is not doing work and trusts the reader to fill the gaps. Compare a prose sentence with a poem made from the same moment.

Prose: The bus was late again, so I stood in the rain for twenty minutes, and while I waited I watched a little girl in red boots jump in every puddle she could find, looking happier than anyone else on the street.

"Bus Stop" (written for this guide)

Late bus.
Rain down my collar.
A small girl in red boots
finds every puddle
and says yes to each one.

The poem is about half as long. It drops "happier than anyone else" and lets "says yes to each one" carry the joy. Compression doesn't mean short, though: a long poem is compressed too if every line earns its place.

4. Imagery and figurative language

Imagery is language that makes you see, hear, smell, taste or touch something. Poets prefer a clear picture to a label like "sad" or "beautiful". Ezra Pound's two-line poem "In a Station of the Metro" first appeared in Poetry magazine in April 1913:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Pound never says the faces looked pale and lovely in the dark station. He sets two pictures side by side and lets your mind join them. Describing one thing as if it were another like this is the idea behind a metaphor.

You can test this in your own writing. "I was sad that summer ended" tells the reader a feeling. This shows it:

"September" (written for this guide)

The pool is drained.
One flip-flop waits
by the locked gate.

5. Form

Form is the shape of a poem: how many lines it has, how they group into stanzas, and any rules about rhyme, meter or syllables. Some forms are fixed. A sonnet has 14 lines, as you can see in these sonnet examples. An English haiku is usually three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables, like these haiku examples. Free verse has no fixed form, so each poem finds its own shape.

Here is a haiku written for this guide. The 5-7-5 count forces every word to matter.

"Moth" (written for this guide)

a moth at the glass
taps out a message in dust
the desk lamp hums back

Write a haiku with the free generator

Poetry terms in plain English

These are the words teachers use most when they talk about a poem. Most of the examples come from poems on this page.

Term	What it means	Example
Speaker	The voice talking in the poem. It is not always the poet.	The "I" who leaves the door open in "Back Door"
Tone	The speaker's attitude to the subject: tender, angry, playful, amazed	Excited and joyful in the opening of "The Bells"
Mood	The feeling the poem leaves in the reader	Quiet and a little lonely in "September"
Imagery	Words that appeal to the senses	"glazed with rain / water"
Metaphor	Describing one thing as if it were another	Faces in a crowd as "Petals on a wet, black bough"
Personification	Giving human actions to something that is not human	"the desk lamp hums back" in "Moth"
Alliteration	Repeating the first consonant sound in nearby words	"merriment their melody" in "The Bells"
Assonance	Repeating vowel sounds inside nearby words	The long "i" in "In the icy air of night"
Onomatopoeia	A word that sounds like what it means	"tinkle" in "The Bells"; "taps" and "hums" in "Moth"
Repetition	Using a word, phrase or line more than once for effect	Archibald MacLeish starts six lines of "Ars Poetica" with "A poem should"
Allusion	A short reference to a well-known story, person or text	Calling a long trip home "an odyssey" points to Homer's Odyssey
Enjambment	A sentence running over a line break without a pause	"I left the back door open / for you"

What is poetry? How famous poets define it

Poets have argued about this for centuries. Here are six well-known answers, each checked against the original text.

Poet	What they said	Where it comes from
William Wordsworth	"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity"	Preface to Lyrical Ballads, added to the second edition (1800)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge	"prose = words in their best order;—poetry = the best words in the best order."	Conversation of July 12, 1827, printed in Table Talk (1835)
Percy Bysshe Shelley	"Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."	A Defence of Poetry (written 1821, published 1840)
Edgar Allan Poe	"I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty."	"The Poetic Principle" (published 1850, after his death)
Emily Dickinson	"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."	Said to Thomas Wentworth Higginson on August 16, 1870, and printed in his essay "Emily Dickinson's Letters" in The Atlantic Monthly (1891)
Archibald MacLeish	"A poem should not mean / But be."	The last lines of "Ars Poetica", Poetry magazine (June 1926)

Wordsworth and Dickinson define poetry by feeling. Coleridge and Poe define it by craft: the best words, in the best order, with rhythm. Shelley ties it to the mind at its best, and MacLeish says a poem is an experience, not a message to decode. Together they suggest a working answer: poetry is language made with great care so that you feel it, not only understand it.

Poetry vs prose

Prose is written in sentences and paragraphs, and the width of the page decides where each line ends. Poetry is written in lines, and the poet decides. In Coleridge's terms, prose needs the words in the best order, and poetry needs the best words as well.

	Poetry	Prose
Basic unit	The line and the stanza	The sentence and the paragraph
Line endings	Chosen by the poet	Set by the page or screen
Sound	Rhythm, rhyme and repeated sounds matter a lot	Sound matters less
Density	Compressed, with gaps for the reader to fill	Explains more and links ideas fully
How it is read	Slowly, often aloud, often more than once	Usually straight through, for the story or the facts

The border is not sharp: a prose poem is written in paragraphs but uses the compression, sound and imagery of poetry.

The main kinds of poetry

Poems are often sorted into three broad kinds by what they do:

• Lyric poetry expresses one speaker's thoughts and feelings, usually in a short poem. The name comes from the lyre, the small harp that ancient Greek poets played as they sang.
• Narrative poetry tells a story, with characters and events. Ballads and epics are narrative poems.
• Dramatic poetry is spoken in the voice of a character. Shakespeare's plays in verse are dramatic poetry, and so is a dramatic monologue such as Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" (1842).

Inside those three kinds sit dozens of forms. A few that people often look up:

• Epic: a very long narrative poem about heroes and events that matter to a whole people, such as Homer's Iliad.
• Ballad: a story told in short, songlike stanzas, often four lines with the second and fourth lines rhyming.
• Ode: a poem of praise addressed to its subject, such as John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" (1819).
• Free verse: poetry with no regular rhyme or meter.
• Acrostic: a poem whose first letters spell a word when you read down the page.

Our guide to the 15 types of poems explains each form with a real example. For great poems to read next, start with our list of famous poems.

Why people read and write poetry

• To say what is hard to say. Love, grief and joy are often too big for plain sentences, so people reach for poems at weddings, funerals and birthdays.
• To remember. Rhythm and rhyme make words stick, which is why stories were passed on in verse long before most people could read.
• To notice things. A poem like "The Red Wheelbarrow" trains you to look hard at something ordinary.
• To play. Limericks, riddles and nonsense verse are poetry for fun.
• To feel less alone. Finding your own feeling in a poem written two hundred years ago is oddly comforting.

Common mistakes people make about poetry

• "A poem has to rhyme." It doesn't. Rhyme is one tool among many. Free verse has no regular rhyme, and much of Shakespeare's dialogue is unrhymed verse.
• "Any sentence chopped into lines is a poem." Line breaks need a reason: a pause, a stressed word, a small surprise. If the breaks could fall anywhere, the poem is not using them.
• "Poems must be about big, serious things." A wheelbarrow, a moth and a lost flip-flop are good subjects.
• "Old-fashioned words sound more poetic." "Thee", "o'er" and twisted word order to force a rhyme usually weaken a modern poem. Plain, exact words work better.
• "Every poem has one hidden meaning." A good poem can hold more than one reading, as long as each reading fits the words on the page.

Try it: turn one sentence into a poem

This 10-minute exercise uses everything above.

1. Write one sentence about something you saw today. Keep it plain and true.
2. Cut it to 15 words or fewer. Remove any words that name a feeling.
3. Swap one general word for a specific one: "a bird" becomes "a crow", "food" becomes "cold pizza".
4. Break it into three to five lines. Then break it a different way. Read both versions aloud and keep the one where the pauses feel right.
5. Give it a title that adds something the lines don't say.

For a full method, follow our step-by-step guide on how to write a poem. To see a draft on any topic first, try the free AI poem generator, then rewrite its lines in your own words.

Turn your idea into a poem, free

FAQ

What is the difference between poetry and a poem?

Poetry is the art form, or a body of work. A poem is a single piece of poetry. You read a poem, and you study poetry.

Does a poem have to rhyme?

No. Many poems rhyme, but free verse has no regular rhyme or meter, and blank verse has a steady beat without rhyme.

What are the three main types of poetry?

Lyric poetry (one speaker's thoughts and feelings), narrative poetry (a story told in verse) and dramatic poetry (verse spoken by a character, as in a play or a dramatic monologue).

What are the elements of a poem?

The main elements are lines and line breaks, sound and rhythm, compression, imagery and form. Essays about poems also discuss speaker, tone and mood.

Are song lyrics poetry?

Song lyrics are poetry written to be sung. Some read well on the page, while others depend on the music. In 2016 Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".