What's A Poem?—Continued

Poetry means many things to many people. It's hard to put your hands around a simple definition. Likewise, it's sometimes hard to be sure that a poem, even when looking at one.

True, a poem is sometimes difficult to recognize or define; but must a poem be like the rose in the famous line from Gertrude Stein's poem, A rose is a rose is a rose? Are we doomed to define a poem only by the phrase, A poem is a poem is a poem?

And what about poetry as an art form? Must the nature of poetry remain forever beyond our grasp? Is poetry so intangible that it can only be self-defining? Is all we can say about poetry is that it is what it is?

The Muse of Literature doesn't think so. The Muse has tried hard to find a crisp definition for the word poem and has come up with one. Hope you like it:

A poem is a verbal, rhythmic, aesthetic, textual or oral composition designed to convey experiences, ideas, or emotions in a vivid and imaginative way.

Poems are characterized by the use of:

• Thought-provoking, evocative, condensed language with a high degree of emotional content chosen for sound and suggestive power.
• Literary devices such as metaphor, rhyme, figurative language, rhetoric, verse, and repetition.

Because poems tend to be tense and emotional evocations, they are often shorter and more concentrated in language and ideas than either prose pieces or dramas. However, some poems extend to hundreds of pages.

Notice the word verbal. Verbal means of or pertaining to words. While most poems are written to be heard, others are written to be read. Some poems—especially thought-provoking poems or poems with very condensed or convoluted language—are designed to be repeatedly written and read. A few modern poems, like those typical of e.e. cummings, contain words, symbols, or images that are graphically arranged on the page; they are written to be seen while being read. A handful of modern poems are written to be performed, with accompanying choreographed facial expressions, gestures, or sound effects.

Measured by all these criteria, Spiral Poem is a poem. It is an example of a modern poem meant to be seen while being read.

• Revisit Spiral Poem and decide for yourself. Return to The Muse Of Literature's page called Welcome To The World Of Poetry. The graphic is by Forrest Cahoon; the text is by Susu Jeffrey: click here.

the litmus test

Does this definition stand a litmus test? Is there a crucial and revealing way to test it, one that proves its correctness and worth? To see, let's take a look at the quirky but ingratiating famous little poem titled Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes by Strickland Gillian:

You've just read the poem said to be the shortest poem in the English language. That's all there is to it—the poem's title and the lines Adam Had 'em.

...Look fast! It just whizzed by!

Though the tone of this gem of a verse isn't lofty and the writing may not be literature with a capital "L," common sense argues that it's a poem. It's funny and clever and it rhymes. But does that make it poetry? Let's see if it satisfies the definition of a poem.

No, the poem is not a paean to microbes. By focusing on microbes, the poem wittily and succinctly makes this point—that mankind is not so high and mighty. How does it use poetic means to do this?

• It compares Adam, the father of us all and the symbol for mankind, to the microbe and concludes that both shared space in the Garden before the Fall; both are part of God's plan. This is a leveler.
• It implies that Adam was no more noble than his companion, Eve, since both were kicked out of the Garden.
• Mankind doesn't loom so large when compared with so small a form of life.
• Evoking Adam in the Garden reminds us of antiquity. How mighty can man be if mere microbes have been able to persist as long as he?
• Evoking antiquity reminds us of how long it's been since the world began and dwarfs man by comparison.
• The poem is over in a flash. It's brevity makes man seem even smaller, less important.
• Using the words lines and antiquity in the title reminds us of some of the long, tedious, and lofty poems about mankind we've encountered in the past. The title sets us up; it leads us to expect the same kind of lengthy and overblown treatment from this poem as we've endured from others. The surprise we experience when we realize how short the poem is underscores the smallness of the subject.
• Even the title's sheer length carries the impact of the message. The long, bold title line seems to tower over the two short, short lines that make up the body of the poem; and it's the body of the poem where Adam appears.
• The body of the poem seems to be squeezed, even flattened, between the title and credit.
• And the two words had 'em are punch-packed with meaning. Why, even the word them is compressed; it's diminished by an elision.

As for being condensed, notice how much thought and humor it expresses in just nine words.

the litmus test applied

By The Muse's definition, Gillian's little two-liner certainly is a poem. It's a vivid and imaginative verbal composition. It has a strong beat (meter) and an equally strong rhyme, both of which help it make its point with humor. It's clever, too; notice that it never mentions its subject—microbes—in the body. To do that would detract from its impact.

Try reading the poem aloud more than once with a different emphasis each time. It can be interpreted in several ways.

The more we think about it, the more this astonishing little poem grows in stature.  Even though it isn't lofty, it has all of the characteristics needed to make it great.

Must a poem rhyme?

Perhaps this is the right time to rid ourselves of two old bugaboos about verse—that a verse must rhyme to be a poem and that poetry must rhyme.

Must a poem rhyme to be a poem? Of course not. Many of the greatest poems of all time do not rhyme. In fact, one of the most important forms of poetry—blank verse—is, by definition, unrhymed verse. Verse is just another word for poem.

One of the most vital forms of blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter, the preeminent dramatic and narrative verse form in English and also the standard form for dramatic verse in Italian and German. Iambic pentameter is the most frequently used verse form in English dramatic, epic, and reflective verse. The stresses and the position of the caesura (pause) in each line catch the shifting tonal qualities and emotional overtones of language and arranges lines into thought groups and paragraphs.

Shakespeare is one of its most famous proponents of blank verse. His Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, and The Winter's Tale are examples of the subtlest kind human delight, grief, or perplexity. These qualities are among those that make a poem poetic. Other examples of blank verse: Wordsworth's The Prelude; Shelley's The Cenci; Keats' Hyperion; and Frost in A Masque of Reason.

what a poem is not

Poetry has often been confused with the notion of literary genre. As explained above on this page, a poem is a kind of composition, which places it in the category of a literary form.

• Explore The Muse's definition of literary form at the page called Literary Forms: click here.
• Explore The Muse's definition of literary genre at the page called Literary Genres: click here.
• Explore the definition of poetry further; visit The Muse's Glossary Of Literary Terms. See definitions of other literary terms, such as metaphor, figurative language, meter, rhyme, and verse: click here.