Poem

A poem is a piece of writing in which the line, the sound of the words and the compression of meaning do as much work as the sentence, so that how it is said is part of what it says.

Read this aloud: "I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o'er vales and hills". The sentence is plain, but the break after "cloud" gives the word a moment to hang in the air. That moment is the poem's doing, and prose would not have made it.

What a poem uses

A poem is built from a small kit of tools, and most poems use several at once.

• The line. The break is a unit of meaning and a unit of breath. Where it falls tells the reader what to weigh.
• Sound. Rhyme, rhythm, alliteration and assonance make a line pleasant or harsh before it means anything.
• Compression. Every word carries more than it would in a paragraph, often through imagery and metaphor.
• Shape. The poem may follow a known form, such as a sonnet, or invent its own, as in free verse.

Why it matters to a writer or editor

Poetry is edited differently from prose. In a story, an editor asks whether a sentence is clear. In a poem, a line that looks odd may be the point, so the first question is whether the oddness is chosen. Check the line breaks, the repeated sounds and the ending, which in a poem tends to land harder than in a paragraph.

Prose writers also gain from poetry. A novelist who reads a poem a day learns to cut a sentence to its strongest word and to hear the rhythm of a paragraph.

A quick way to read one

Read it twice, once for sense and once for sound. Find the image that stays with you. Then look for the turn, the place where the poem changes direction, which in a sonnet has its own name, the volta.

Read an example

Read an example: "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by William Wordsworth, a public domain poem on Bossfeed. More old poems are in the Bossfeed daily poem archive.

Frequently asked questions

What makes something a poem?

Mostly the line. A poem breaks its text into lines on purpose, so the reader pauses where the poet chose, and it leans on sound, rhythm and image more than ordinary prose does. Rhyme is common but not required.

Does a poem have to rhyme?

No. A great deal of poetry written in the last century does not rhyme. Rhyme is one tool among several, alongside rhythm, repetition, imagery and the shape of the stanza.

What is the difference between a poem and a song lyric?

A lyric is written to be heard with music, which supplies rhythm and emphasis. A poem has to carry those on the page alone, through line breaks, punctuation and the sound of the words.