Vague Poems Aren’t Smarter
How to write a more powerful, impactful poem
As I stated in a previous article, poetry writing is a complex topic. However, we’ll start with this: a good poem needs to be concise, specific, and concrete. For this article, we’ll discuss specificity.
Specificity
There is a lingering belief that good poetry should be vague and “dreamy” and that this will make it “intelligent” and universal.
Um, nope.
Let me explain. As it was taught to me in graduate school, in the early 1900s, the literary world was taken by storm by a literary theory movement called New Criticism. The New Critics were members of the Ivory Tower, and they decided that poetry should be only a collegiate pursuit. They taught that lay people had no business reading and writing poetry. As editors of various literary magazines and journals, they only published poetry that was so cerebral that professors (or maybe graduate students) could understand it. A good example of this would be T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland.” (To read “The Wasteland” now is to have footnotes longer than the poem itself.) As a result of this, up and coming poets began writing poems that were purposefully confusing and vague. In short, they went around the problem by faking their way through it. It worked.
