Let’s start with a confession – I was one of those students in high school who ardently disliked poetry. All those esoteric verses about nature, love, and the meaning of life? No thanks; I’ll take my clear, linear prose instead.
Looking back now, I realize how foolish I was to dismiss one of humanity’s oldest and most transcendent art forms. Poetry is the art of compressing powerful imagery and ideas into a small space, like steam gathering before a volcanic eruption. The best poems pack an emotional punch that can leave you breathless.
My old English teachers tried hammering the technical aspects of meter, rhyme, and other poetry fundamentals into our stubborn teenage skulls. But I’ve since realized studying poetry shouldn’t feel like a lecture – it’s more like learning to appreciate music or dance. There are certain fundamentals of poetry to understand, but the real joy comes from experiencing the rhythm, emotion, and artistry firsthand.
So whether you’re studying poetry in a classroom or just want to enrich your personal reading, here’s a guide to the fundamental concepts behind this rich, timeless art form. Consider it a roadmap toward developing your “poetry ear” and discovering the music that can exist within sparing, well-chosen words.
The Rhythm Section: Meter and Scansion
At its most basic, a poem’s rhythm is derived from the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. This pattern of intonations is called meter. For example:
“‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house..”
This familiar opening line from the classic Christmas poem A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement Clarke Moore demonstrates trochaic meter, with the stress falling on the first syllable of each foot (the two-syllable segments).
To analyze a poem’s meter, you’ll need to learn scansion, marking the stressed and unstressed syllables with the proper notation. Here’s how that Christmas line scans:
/'Twas the/ 'night be-/ 'fore Christ-/ 'mas, and/ 'all through/ 'the house.../
While trochaic meter is common, others exist too, like iambic, spondaic, anapestic and more.
Like music, finding the rhythm lurking behind any poem’s words is an innate skill that takes practice. But mastering meter gives you a window into how the poem musically breathes and sighs.
Playing with Structure: The Sonnet, Haiku, and More
Once you get the flow of meter down, turn to the bigger structural containers certain poems are packaged in. Some of the most famous forms include:
- Sonnets (14 lines split into an 8/6 rhyme scheme pattern, popularized by Petrarch and Shakespeare)
- Haikus (concise 3-line poems with a 5-7-5 syllable structure originating in Japan)
- Limericks (pithy 5-line jokes with an AABBA rhyme scheme made famous by Edward Lear)
- Rhyming couplets (successive pairs of rhyming lines like “Full many a glorious morning have I seen / Flatter the mountaintops with sovereign eye”)
- Ballads (narrative poems laced with rhymes and refrains, like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”)
Working within established forms both inspires creative wordplay and challenges poets to make their ideas fit the proscribed scheme. The haiku, for instance, forces poets to prune superfluous fluff and distill images down to a vivid handful of words. Learning to bend your thoughts to a sonnet’s twisting rhyme patterns is an artistic brain-twister.
Conversely, free verse broke from traditional forms in the late 19th-century to explore more conversational flow and emotional expression. Well-known examples are T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and innovative works by Walt Whitman.
Of course, many great poets hybridize forms or bend the rules entirely. But familiarizing yourself with these classic structures and poetry fundamentals provide a stable creative foundation to build off.
A Rose by Any Other Metaphor…
One of poetry’s special pleasures is unearthing the multiple layers of meaning tucked within carefully chosen metaphors and figurative language. These compressed bundles of imagery and symbolism are the fundamental elements that give poems their richness.
For example, when Sylvia Plath writes,
“Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air”,
it paints a haunting metaphorical picture of rebirth and resilience, as well as a sense of defiance and strength in the face of adversity. Robert Frost’s nature images like “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” are metaphors for life choices.
Skilled poets stretch the boundaries of metaphor further. In Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” an encounter with an aging brute of a catch takes on deeper symbolic meaning of courage and perseverance against harsh elements. Emily Dickinson is the master of transforming domestic scenes into profound reflections on the human condition.
Finding these deeper symbolic undercurrents hidden within poetic metaphors is like mining for diamonds—and the central reward of reading poetry itself.
Poking Life’s Profundities
Poems, by virtue of their condensed, imagistic nature, have a unique capacity to transform lofty philosophical topics into resonating, visceral language. Life’s most probing questions and emotions surrounding love, death, morality, and the human experience itself find a powerful voice.
John Donne’s metaphysical poetry, The Flea, mines the intellectual depths behind the physical pleasures of earthly love. Sylvia Plath’s poem “Parliament Hill Fields” delves into the anguish of infertility, as does “Stillbirth” by Sharon Olds. These poems offer haunting and poignant explorations of the pain and longing experienced by those struggling with infertility. Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” emanates spiritual uplift out of simple observations of nature.
Diving into a good poem often provokes the same soul-stirring connection as great music does. That’s because the poet has managed to encapsulate entire universes of complex emotion into stripped-down verses.
And when you discover lines so timeless and insightful that they embed themselves into your psyche? Well, that’s the sublime payoff of studying poetry. After all, who can’t relate to Frost’s “miles to go before I sleep” mantra of perseverance? Or Maya Angelou’s empowering claim that “Still I’ll rise”? The great poets find simple yet profound ways to tap into our universal experiences.
The Hard Work Behind Sparks of Genius
Anyone who has grappled with writing even a half-decent rhyming couplet knows it’s easier said than done. Crafting a truly remarkable poem—one that achieves that spine-tingling resonance—requires grueling work.
T.S. Eliot’s epochal masterpiece “The Waste Land” famously emerged after 37 painful drafts, pulling in scraps of dialogue, literary fragments, and personal agonies over 433 lines of modernist genius. Robert Frost spent years tinkering and refining his compact gems like “Nothing Gold Can Stay” to get the words just right.
Or let’s talk about Emily Dickinson quietly squirreling away nearly 1800 poems while leading a reclusive life, stuffing away her creations in cake boxes and desk drawers for the world to discover later. Even today’s greatest poets—Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney, and Tracy K. Smith—speak candidly about the sweat and countless rewrites behind any work that achieves transcendence.
So as you study poetry, keep in mind those moments of sheer brilliance are the products of painstaking revision, unbridled creativity, and the guts to go boldly against convention. It turns lines that could have been hollow scribbles into enduring literary masterpieces.
How to Fall in Love with Poetry
In the end, any technical understanding of poetry fundamentals like rhyme, meter, and metaphor is just scratching the surface. True poetry comprehension involves taking those tools and learning to deeply absorb the poet’s unique expression and artistry.
So how does one actually cultivate a love for and mastery of this concentrated art form?
Here are some key steps I’ve found helpful over the years:
- Read poetry out loud. So much of a poem’s power comes from the rhythmic, musical qualities – so let your ear absorb the intonations. I like to picture each line break like a gasping breath before the next thought emerges.
- Start accessibly. While dissecting canonical poets like Shakespeare and Keats is crucial, don’t begin there. Collections by Billy Collins, Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni and other contemporary writers make ideal entry points.
- Read it again. And probably a third or fourth time after that. Let the layered meanings and imagery permeate slowly over repeated readings. What caught your attention this time versus the first pass?
- Look up context. Understanding a bit about the poet’s background, perspectives or the historical context surrounding the work adds seasoning. That said, poetry is highly personal – so also honor your own interpretations.
- Share your favorites. Poetry is meant to be celebrated communally, not poured over in solitary confinement. Share lines that dazzled you. Read striking works aloud with friends or family and discuss.
- Start scribbling. “We’re all poets” really isn’t hyperbole – the poetic mindset and creative wordplay benefits everyone. Spend time penning your own verses and metaphors; it’ll deepen your respect for the craft.
At its core, poetry distills the most magnetic qualities of language itself – rhythm, insight, passion, beauty. Drink it in through your senses first before getting caught up in technical analysis.
Because for all the groundwork behind studying fundamentals, rhyme schemes and literary devices, the purpose of great poetry remains simple – to provide tiny linguistic grenades that detonate inside our souls and remind us why words themselves are so thrillingly alive.