What is Poetry?

April 15, 2022

April is National Poetry Month, and this week we revive an old tradition by devoting an entire issue to the form. But first we ask a very basic question: What is poetry, anyway? There’s no simple answer, as our columnist Elisa Gabbert explains in an essay that probes and celebrates that very ambiguity. “The poem is a vessel,” she writes; “poetry is liquid.”

The Shape of the Void: Toward a Definition of Poetry

By Elisa Gabbert

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

Illustration by Na Kim.

Best Known as a Holocaust Poet, Nelly Sachs Deserves Another Look

By Daisy Fried

“Flight and Metamorphosis,” a collection by Nelly Sachs first published in 1959 and newly translated into English by Joshua Weiner with Linda B. Parshall, reveals a poet full of mystery and depth.

Illustration by Linda Huang.

A Poet Looks at the End of the World, and Reaches for Hope

By Stephanie Burt

The poems in Linda Gregerson’s new collection, “Canopy,” make up a kind of grief counseling, turning our attention from the forever lost to the not-yet-gone.

Illustration by Jaya Miceli.

The Titanic Sank. So Did These Commemorative Poems.

By Tina Jordan

The New York Times frontpage on Tuesday, April 16, 1912

Listen to the Poem “The Convergence of the Twain — Lines on the Loss of the Titanic” by Thomas Hardy

Shortly after the Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, readers began sending The Times poems they had written about the tragedy. Three days later, the paper issued the following statement: “Far, far, is it from our wish or intention to hurt anybody’s feelings. But we do wish to state, very, very gently, that one of the most difficult tasks a real poet, experienced and skilled in the practice of his art, could understate/undertake would be to write an adequate and fitting poem on the loss of the Titanic.”

Readers were not dissuaded. On April 30, the paper adopted a sterner tone in an editorial headlined “Only Poets Should Write Verse.” It began, “In spite of our gentle hint, the other day, that more people were sending to this office verses on the Titanic than were qualified as poets … the flood of these contributions continues. It does seem time to say again that to write about the Titanic a poem worth printing requires that the author should have something more than paper, pencil and a strong feeling that the disaster was a terrible one.”

On May 25, 1912, The Times printed — on Page 1 — a new poem by Thomas Hardy about the tragedy, “The Convergence of the Twain — Lines on the Loss of the Titanic,” which apparently unleashed a new deluge of reader-submitted poems, “hundreds and hundreds” of them. This was the final straw. The paper’s Topics of The Times columnist marveled at the “audacity” of these amateur poets. After all, he pointed out, “The Convergence of the Twain” wasn’t very good, and if “a man of talent with at least a flash of genius now and then” had so visibly struggled, well, “it ought to serve as a dreadful warning” for lesser writers.

Facing ‘the Can’t-See of the Future,’ in Verse and on the Chiropractor’s Table

By Srikanth Reddy

Dana Levin freely shares the self-doubts and false starts of her gradual return to writing in “Now Do You Know Where You Are.” (If this sounds emotionally risky and artistically gutsy, it is.)

Illustration by Clay Hickson.

He Never Existed. Here Are His Selected Poems.

By Christopher Soto

“Madness,” by Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué, is presented as a career retrospective for a writer invented from whole cloth.

Illustration by Marta Cerdá Alimbau.

In
Defense of
Poetry

By David Orr

In “Rhyme's Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry,” Brad Leithauser explains how verse works, and why we should care.
Illustration by David Pearson.

One Last Book From an Australian Poet Who Was Part Hero, Part Pariah

By William Logan

Les Murray’s posthumous collection “Continuous Creation” highlights both his crankiness and the rough magnificence of the landscape he loved.

Illustration by Nathaniel Russell.

In Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Diaries, the Private Life of a Celebrity Poet

By Heather Clark

“Rapture and Melancholy,” edited by Daniel Mark Epstein and released seven decades after Millay's death, is a portrait of artistic triumph, romantic tumult and a daily life that descended into addiction.

Illustration by Joanna Neborsky.

Moving From Elegy to Ecstasy, a Poet Pushes Against the Canon

By Sandra Simonds

“Best Barbarian,” a new collection by Roger Reeves, riffs on Western tradition to challenge its omissions and expand its political and artistic possibilities.

Illustration by Mark Pernice.

By The Book

“I’ve even read at M.M.A. fights, which is a perfect place to read lyric poems, where you can read one or two whole poems in between rounds.” —Ocean Vuong

Read his interview →

A Poet Who Looks at the Stuff of Daily Life and Sees Looming Apocalypse

By Troy Jollimore

Whether the subject is love, national politics or European vacations, the end result seems the same in “Venice,” Ange Mlinko’s latest collection: Reality tends to defeat our aspirations.

Illustration by Hannah K. Lee.

A Poet’s Poet: The Astonishing Career of John Keats

By Robert Pinsky

In “Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph,” Lucasta Miller evokes the shifting, various genius of her subject.

Illustration by Mark Harris.

In 2014, a Ukrainian Poet Wrote a Sonnet About Love and War. It Still Resonates.

Listen to the Poem ‘In that life I would have dwelt...,’ by Yuri Burjak

My friend, the poet, translator and editor Yuri Burjak, was born in Dnipro in 1951 and lives today in northern Kyiv. Part of the ’70s generation of Ukrainian writers, he joined the Ukrainian Writers’ Union in 1984. His more than a dozen volumes of poetry have received a number of literary prizes, culminating in the 2015 Schevenko Prize, the state’s highest honor for contribution to arts and culture, for the mystical, metaphysical “Not the Dead Sea.” Hospitable and collegiate, Burjak has dedicated his professional life to founding a number of independent literary publishing houses, and to translating contemporary and classical poetry and medieval epic into Ukrainian. This untitled poem from his 200sonnet sequence “Millennium” (2014) is, like much contemporary Ukrainian verse written since Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea, haunted by war and the proximity of history. — Fiona Sampson

In that life I would have dwelt in Lviv (or maybe Vienna)

in a narrow street, on the first floor,

with flowers standing on the balcony

and an old bike in the entrance;

I would have been in love with a café waitress,

a girl with a Galician accent and a dark gaze,

and I’d have heard the “Radetzky March” from the barracks —

drums mixed up with the overseas drill;

I would have gone to a secret address to resist the aliens

threatening Europe,

and been taken for questioning from Lonsky Prison,

and perhaps somewhere, among the women covering their faces with shawls

in the prison yard after the retreat and before the attack (and the beginning of opera),

would have been my black-eyed girl.

— Yuri Burjak

Translated by Nikolai Scherbak and Fiona Sampson

(Note: Lonsky Prison, the former political detention center in Lviv, is now Ukraine’s National Memorial Museum for the Victims of Occupation.)

Yuri Burjak is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections and the winner of the Schevenko Prize in Ukraine. Fiona Sampson, a British poet whose most recent book is the Elizabeth Barrett Browning biography “Two-Way Mirror,” originally published this sonnet in her literary journal POEM.