It’s been described as embarrassing, clichéd or “unhelpful singsong.” Many poets dislike it too, but it’s a style they’ve learned from each other.

“Poetry leaves something out,” our columnist Elisa Gabbert says. But that’s hardly the extent of it. By Elisa Gabbert I once heard a student say poetry is language that’s “coherent enough.” I love a ...

“What is poetry? Why, sir,” roared Dr. Johnson to his ever-attentive Boswell, “we all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is . . . It is much easier to say what it is not.” Poetry ...

Humans spend most of their waking hours playing with what novelist Rudyard Kipling called “the most powerful drug used by mankind”—words. In the laboratories of our minds, we sort, slice, and string ...

If you think poetry isn't for you, this might be the right time to give it a second chance. Every April in the United States, National Poetry Month invites you to experience and celebrate an art form ...

Tennyson has a poem, "The Vision of Sin," which contains the lines: "Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born." Polymath Charles Babbage (inventor, engineer, and mathematician, considered by ...

Audre Lorde told us this in 1977. Although she spoke specifically to women, I hope she won’t mind me saying that her words can apply to other folks, too. She wrote: “poetry is not a luxury. It is a ...