F or Jeremy Bentham, a philosopher, poetry was simply writing that “fails” to reach the end of the line. For W.H. Auden, a ...

will not win the National Poetry Series. The final phrase seems plucked from T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which gives the last line an unintended comic air, because Eliot is referring to ...

I had things I wanted to say, and so I said them. Word after word, and line after line. Some poems rhymed and some didn’t. I don’t remember worrying about ideas, or how to get an idea ...

We shared their photos with five poets who responded to the images with original poems. The result is a duet between photographer and poet: lens and line, frame and form.

In her 1840 “I Slept, and Dreamed that Life was Beauty,” she writes a six-line poem, in tetrameter couplets, about how work, a life of duty, can make real the highest of dreams, a life of beauty. Like ...

My own eye latched onto this four-line poem, in the middle of class, because it was so short — which made it seem larger than the others, like the large-print text in Dr. Seuss, almost easier to ...