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 ...

A framed poster of a stamp depicting Langston Hughes, who wrote some of the best poems in American history. Poetry provides the perfect way to indulge in the escapism of reading without the commitment ...

Musée des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a ...

A faultless lyric from 1887 mourns what seems to be repressed gay love ...

Poetry can be intimidating. As students, many of us were taught that the goal of reading a poem was to “understand” exactly what the poet was trying to say. No small charge. The Common Core State ...

Hundreds of millions of poetic words have been written throughout history. Navigate your way into this beautiful art form with this list of the most famous poems ever written. What jumps into your ...

April is National Poetry Month—perhaps a good time to review the positive aspects of reading and writing poems. Poetry is a genre of writing in which succinct, vivid, and intense language is given to ...

At a loss for words? Poetry expresses the feelings we struggle to convey. Open any poetry book for proof: You’ll find love poems for romantic moments, silly rhymes for kids and limericks for when you ...

Narrative means story and a narrative poem tells a story. Lots of poems are mainly about thoughts and feelings and not about telling a story, so this is a key difference. Key features of narrative ...

American poet Emily Dickinson. A mystical recluse, she lived all her life in Amherst, Massachusetts. Emily Dickinson was a 19th-century American poet whose name has become synonymous with classic ...