You’re Probably a Bad Poet
Article by Troy Camplin

It’s easy to be a bad poet nowadays. All you have to do is “write what you feel” — and be sure that you break it up into lines. Since free verse poetry has come to dominate poetry in the last century, everyone has come to the conclusion that he or she can be a poet. If, in order to be considered a poet, you had to learn how to write in iambic pentameter and to use end rhyme and alliteration, not to mention using other rhythms, sound patterns, and poetic forms, there would be many fewer poets in the world — and far, far fewer bad poets as a result.

This doesn’t mean that all free verse poetry is bad, of course. Nor does it mean that all traditional verse is good, either. While free verse is easy to write, it’s extremely difficult to master. And in order to master it, you will more likely than not have to learn such things as how to write in iambic, trochaic, and other rhythms, how to write sonnets, ghazals, and other poetic forms, and learn to pay attention to rhyme, assonance, and other sounds. You will have to have created a poetic foundation to create more masterful free verse poems.

Even if you learn all of these aspects of poetry, though, it’s still more likely than not that you’ll end up being a bad poet. There’s more to writing poetry than form. There has to be interesting content as well. And I hate to tell you, but you’re probably not very interesting. You probably think basically the same things about friends and family and life as everyone else. This is precisely where free verse shows its weakness. After all, if you are writing what are essentially prose sentences with line breaks, you’re just going to say whatever comes first to mind.

Unfortunately, whatever comes first to mind is likely to be what come first to most minds. How do you fix that. Well, you might stop and try to think about whatever comes second to mind — and if that seems too common, think of whatever comes third to mind. However, if you write rhyming verse, you can actually force yourself to come up with more interesting things simply because you have to find the rhyme. The same is true of writing in a regular rhythm. The next word has to fit the rhythm, and if you need a stressed syllable, then the word that first came to mind may not work. If you have to come up with a rhyme in the next sentence, you may not be able to write the next line that first came to mind. You’ll find yourself forced to find other words, other phrases, other ways of thinking.

In the best situations, the poem will actually end up writing itself, so to speak. This admittedly happens more often the more practice you have writing structured verse. In fact, you will probably find that most of your early poems you attempt in, say, iambic pentameter, are not going to be very good at all. It takes a lot of very bad verse to learn how to write iambic pentameter lines well — or at all. But with practice, you will find that, eventually, you’ll be able to write in iambic pentameter almost without thinking about it. When you reach that point, it’s important to challenge yourself further — try different rhythms, try different rhyme schemes, try alliterative verse, try different forms.

As you learn to write in different forms, you will find that you can only say certain things in those forms. Writing in blank verse only is very restrictive — it only allows you to say certain things in certain ways. Sonnets allow for another way of saying things, and different kinds of sonnets — Shakespearean vs. Petrarchan, for example — further allow different ways of saying those things. A ghazal creates new ways of saying things that a sonnet cannot. One could go on and on. You could take the same theme, write about that theme in a variety of forms, and you will find you will say very different things in each form. You may even say opposite things. You may even find yourself surprising yourself about what you think, or where the form will take you.

It’s when you’ve mastered a variety of forms, when you’ve mastered various rhythms and rhyme, that you begin to feel yourself not driving the writing of your poems anymore, but feeling more like you’re pulled. This is the feeling the ancient Greeks called inspiration by the Muses. The Muses are the children of Memory and Zeus (God), showing the Greeks understood that having a head full of knowledge was just as important as enthusiasm (which literally means “filled with God”) and inspiration (which means “filled with divine spirit). The Muses come to you when you are prepared for them. Before the Muses visit you, your poetry will always feel pushed, forced, and your themes will likely be unpoetic themes — politics, social issues, and other temporary things. Bad poems are poems of their time, only able to be fully understood in their time. Great poems transcend time, are sometimes even untimely. You’ll never write those poems until you reach the point where the Muses come to visit.

What causes the Muses to visit? I have already mentioned preparing yourself by learning various poetic structures and forms — not just in your culture, but from other cultures as well. The other thing I suggested in the paragraph above is knowledge — a wide range of knowledge. If you don’t know much, you won’t have much to write about. Ignorance doesn’t create mystery — and a little learning only creates arrogance — the great poets know so much that they reach the point of despairing of ever knowing anything.

It is at this point that you begin to reach wisdom, which is also a necessary condition to be a great poet. The combination of knowledge and wisdom — of variety and unity — is beauty, and this brings us into the realm of the arts, of poetry. The poet, to be a great poet, is interested in creating works of great beauty. Until you realize that poetry is about beauty, about the creation of beauty in the world, you cannot be a great poet, a good poet, or even a mediocre poet. You can only ever be a bad poet.

The world is full of bad poets — bad poets writing about superficial, temporary topics like politics, bad poets ignorant of economics and neuroscience and quantum physics and any number of other things (you don’t have to know about all of these things of course — but you have to know something! — and you don’t get to write about anything about which you are ignorant!!!), bad poets without the skill to do anything but write bad free verse poetry, poets without the skill to do anything but write terrible sonnets, bad poets without an ounce of wisdom, bad poets writing only about themselves. The world is full of bad poets. We need to start working to become good poets for a change.

It’s hard work to be a good poet, and that’s why many people don’t want to do it. It’s easy to write mediocre free verse, but it’s difficult to write mediocre iambic pentameter. So why not write mediocre free verse? That is, after all, what most people end up doing.

But you should ask yourself:

Why do you want to be a bad poet?