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 ...

“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 ...

With #Poetry amassing more than 93m Instagram posts alone, is the spoken word resonating more than ever?

What is poetry? Is it stanzas written on a page? The flow of words in a certain rhythm? And why have humans done it for thousands of years? These questions are at the heart of a—relatively ...

“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 ...

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.” — William Shakespeare, 'Romeo and Juliet' Ask most people for a list of the most illustrious poets of all time, ...

April is National Poetry Month, and this week we revive an old tradition by devoting an entire issue to the form. But first we ask a very basic question: What is poetry, anyway? There’s no simple ...

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 ...