“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 ...

What is poetry? And what does it offer us? The recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize Carl Phillips, known for the beauty of his language and the depth of exploration, has some answers. Jeffrey Brown ...

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 ...

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 ...

“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 ...