“Poetry leaves something out,” our columnist Elisa Gabbert says. But that’s hardly the extent of it. By Elisa Gabbert I once heard a student say poetry is language that’s “coherent enough.” I love a ...

When you read a poem, you might be struck by its form on the page, the page etched with careful words, the words teased into line breaks. But when you hear it? Then you meet the poem in a more ...

Humans spend most of their waking hours playing with what novelist Rudyard Kipling called “the most powerful drug used by mankind”—words. In the laboratories of our minds, we sort, slice, and string ...

“What is poetry? Why, sir,” roared Dr. Johnson to his ever-attentive Boswell, “we all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is . . . It is much easier to say what it is not.” Poetry ...

Poetry is close to my heart. I would be lost without its very specific magic, its ability to spark wonder and shock and to open up fresh vistas on life in God. But as W. H. Auden famously says in his ...