The Seven Deadly Sins of Poetry
Why Your Verses Fall Flat (And How to Fix Them)
Every poet commits these crimes against language. The difference between amateur and accomplished poets isn't the absence of mistakes, it's the recognition and correction of patterns that weaken their work. Understanding these seven common pitfalls isn't just about avoiding errors; it's about transforming your relationship with poetic craft and discovering why certain poems resonate while others fall silent on the page.
The Abstraction Trap: When Poetry Floats Away from Earth
The first and most seductive mistake is drowning in abstraction. Beginning poets often believe that poetry requires elevated, ethereal language—that concrete details somehow diminish the "poetic" quality of their work. They write about "love" and "beauty" and "truth" without ever showing us the chipped coffee mug that held morning conversations or the way light fractures through a lover's unwashed hair.
Abstract language creates distance between reader and experience. When William Carlos Williams wrote about the red wheelbarrow, he wasn't being simple, he was being precise. The power came not from philosophical meditation on agricultural implements, but from the stark specificity of “glazed with rain water / beside the white chickens."
Consider this transformation: instead of writing “My heart was broken by betrayal," try “Your coffee cup still sits where you left it, / lipstick stain faded to the color / of old roses." The second version doesn't just tell us about heartbreak, it places us inside the experience.
This doesn't mean poetry should avoid big themes, but rather that big themes emerge most powerfully through specific, sensory details. The universal lives in the particular, not in grand pronouncements about the universal.
The Greeting Card Syndrome: When Sentiment Replaces Craft
Poetry's second deadly sin is confusing sentiment with emotion. Hallmark cards traffic in sentiment, predictable, comfortable feelings that require no examination or complexity. Poetry traffics in emotion, the messy, contradictory, surprising ways humans actually experience feeling.
Sentimental poetry tells readers how to feel, rather than creating the conditions for genuine emotional response. It relies on emotional shortcuts: sunsets that automatically signify peace, roses that always mean love, tears that invariably indicate sadness. These symbols have been worn smooth by overuse, like coins that no longer bear recognizable faces.
Authentic poetic emotion often contains contradictions. The mother who loves her child fiercely while occasionally fantasizing about disappearing. The grief that arrives not as expected tears but as inappropriate laughter at the funeral. The joy that carries undertones of terror because happiness feels too fragile to trust.
Elizabeth Bishop understood this complexity when she wrote “One Art," a poem ostensibly about the “art of losing" that reveals itself as a desperate attempt to convince herself that some losses can be mastered. The poem's power comes not from direct emotional statement, but from the tension between what the speaker claims and what her language reveals.
The Rhyme Prison: When Sound Becomes Shackle
Forced rhyme represents poetry's third common failure. Many beginning poets believe that “real" poetry must rhyme, leading them to contort syntax, choose inferior words, or sacrifice meaning for the sake of sound patterns. The result reads like linguistic torture, sentences twisted into unnatural shapes to accommodate rhyme schemes.
Effective rhyme serves the poem's meaning and music simultaneously. When rhyme feels inevitable rather than imposed, it creates a sense of rightness that enhances both sound and sense. But when poets reverse natural word order, choose weaker synonyms, or add unnecessary words just to achieve rhyme, the artifice becomes visible and distracting.
Consider the difference between organic rhyme that emerges from the poem's natural language and mechanical rhyme that forces the poem into predetermined patterns. The best contemporary poets who use rhyme—like Terrance Hayes or A.E. Stallings, make it feel both surprising and inevitable.
Free verse isn't the enemy of musicality, it's simply music organized by different principles. Sound patterns, internal rhymes, assonance, and rhythm can create powerful effects without the constraints of end-rhyme schemes.
The Obscurity Olympics: When Difficulty Becomes the Point
Poetry's fourth mistake is confusing obscurity with profundity. Some poets believe that accessibility diminishes artistic value, that if readers can understand a poem easily, it must lack sophistication. This leads to deliberately opaque writing, where complexity serves no purpose beyond demonstrating the poet's intellectual credentials.
True poetic complexity emerges from wrestling with difficult subjects, not from making simple subjects artificially difficult. T.S. Eliot's “The Waste Land" is challenging because it grapples with cultural fragmentation and spiritual emptiness, not because Eliot wanted to exclude readers. The difficulty serves the poem's exploration of a fractured world.
Contrast this with poems that deploy obscure references, convoluted syntax, or private symbolism simply to appear learned. These poems often collapse under examination because their complexity masks rather than reveals meaning. The reader's struggle yields no proportional reward, like solving a puzzle only to discover its blank inside.
Accessible doesn't mean simple, and complex doesn't mean incomprehensible. The most enduring poems achieve what Robert Frost called “the pleasure of ulteriority", they reward both immediate understanding and deeper investigation. They invite readers in rather than keeping them out.
The Cliché Quicksand: When Language Loses Its Edge
The fifth poetic sin involves surrendering to clichéd language and imagery. Poets fall into this trap when they reach for the first comparison that comes to mind rather than pushing toward fresher, more precise expression. Hearts don't just break, they “shatter into a million pieces." Love isn't just powerful, it's “deeper than the ocean."
Clichés represent the death of attention. They're phrases that once carried vivid meaning but have been worn smooth by repetition. When poets use them, they're essentially asking readers to fill in familiar blanks rather than creating new experiences through language.
The antidote to cliché isn't simply avoiding common phrases, it's developing what Annie Dillard calls “the quality of attention." Look longer, look more specifically, look from unexpected angles. Instead of writing that someone's eyes "sparkled like diamonds," notice how they “held light the way water holds coins", specific, surprising, and true to actual observation.
Fresh metaphors emerge from genuine seeing rather than literary convention. They connect disparate elements in ways that illuminate both subjects. When Sylvia Plath wrote that morning “arrives in a sleep-shirt of gray," she wasn't just describing dawn, she was capturing the intimate, slightly disheveled quality of early light.
The Emotional Thermostat: When Everything Runs at Maximum Volume
Poetry's sixth mistake is emotional monotony, poems that operate at constant high intensity without variation or modulation. These poems assault readers with unrelenting passion, anger, or despair, creating emotional exhaustion rather than genuine impact.
Effective poems understand the power of emotional dynamics. They know when to whisper and when to shout, when to build tension and when to release it. The quiet moments make the loud moments more powerful, just as silence gives meaning to sound in music.
Consider how Philip Larkin builds toward emotional revelation in his poems. He often begins with seemingly mundane observations, gradually accumulating details that suddenly crystallize into profound recognition. The impact comes not from immediate emotional assault but from the careful orchestration of feeling.
Restraint can be more powerful than expression. Sometimes what a poem doesn't say carries more weight than what it does. The emotion that trembles beneath controlled language often moves readers more deeply than the emotion that explodes across the page.
The Autobiography Assumption: When Personal Becomes Universal
The seventh and final common mistake is assuming that personal experience automatically translates into compelling poetry. Many beginning poets believe that because something happened to them, and because it felt significant, it will naturally resonate with readers. They write poems that function as diary entries rather than crafted artistic experiences.
Raw experience requires transformation to become art. The poet's job isn't simply to record what happened but to shape that experience into something that speaks beyond its original context. This transformation often involves finding the universal elements within personal experience while maintaining the specificity that makes the experience vivid.
