Writing Success - Top Tips and Advice Virtually Guaranteed to Improve Your Poetry

Writing poetry is not easy. Here's how to make yours deliver.

To be able to write a good poem you need to be able to delve into your imagination and think of more creative ways to describe places, emotions, objects, people etc. When writing prose you can describe any of these using whole paragraphs or even whole chapters but within poetry if you select and use appropriate words creatively you can express the same feelings and describe the same imagery with the use of just a few words.

A good poem should allow the reader to easily understand its concept and also allow the reader to apply their own imagination to enhance the poem as they read, as they visualise the content being described. The use of analogy is widely used within poetry as it enables the reader to quickly understand what the poet is trying to explain and is also a clever way to reduce the number of words needed to describe a setting or feeling. An excellent and famous use of analogy can be seen in the opening to Wordsworth's poem, I wandered lonely as a cloud;

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.


- W. Wordsworth

The clever use of words is the main element of good poetry and if this can be sustained throughout a poem it will sustain the reader's interest and should successfully deliver the poem's vision.

Poetry can be written on any subject but good poetry should be based around a subject that evokes an emotional response, whether this is joy, sadness, compassion or anger. If written well, a poem can instantly compel the reader to feel the implied emotion.

The length of a good poem is not dictated by science. Good poetry will be long enough to convey its meaning and emotion but short enough to do so without it trawling into a long narrative piece.

In summary, a good piece of poetry should allow the reader to visualise the subject matter, people, places and feelings being expressed. It should be passionate and exciting for the reader through its selective use of words, and it should be cleverly written, so that the reader can identify with the poem's content easily and in a new way that they had never previously considered.

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