A video caught my attention today: What makes poems good?

Reading through the first of three volumes of English poetry, I thought I’d get the professor’s take on what makes a poem good.

Here’s her breakdown-

Poetry isn’t defined by structures, it’s defined by its sound- the use of interesting language to get people to feel new feelings at thoughts.

Think of poetry as experiences- snapshots of life that readers are transplanted into. You want the reader to see through your eyes.

Too often, poets will want to start big and write down. Meaning they will find something they want to express, find a metaphor they can use to describe it, and then proceed to talk about that image in terms of those big ideas and feelings. This almost always fails, because talking about feelings doesn’t help the reader feel those feelings.

Poems with too much abstraction remain detached. We know what is being referred to, but we don’t connect with it. You want people to feel what you feel, and that is best done through concrete images- Show, don’t tell.

Good art makes familiar things seem strange, and strange things seem familiar to us. This is what metaphor does for us. They work because they connect otherwise unconnectable things.

ALL of this needs to be written in language that sounds good to our ears and tastes good when we read it aloud. In most written content, it is the content and purpose that is more important. In poetry, the sound of the language is the preeminent.