Young Writers Society

How do we review poetry objectively?

Prose is much easier to review because it is strict, toned, and disciplined in its form. However, this is not the case for poetry.

Poetry is like a painting, but in words. There is no right or wrong or best or worst in poetry. We can make it however we want without worrying about things like grammar.

Thus, how do we review poetry without ever being too subjective? Is it possible to critique poetry objectively? Or will the beauty of poetry always fall under personal opinions?

I have my own answer to this question. I just want to ask this question to the community and see how far and deep we can discuss this matter.

I believe that there are some things in poetry that can be considered objective, but most of it is subjective and it can be that way. It's like all other art in that it usually has a baseline of things that you can critique and review and "What makes good poetry?" is often a question that can change from person to person as well.

There are things like imagery, structure, flow, voice, tone, and grammar, that are usually critiqued when reviewing poetry. Nobody ever says the exact same thing because it's not math. It doesn't have only one way that you can tackle it, and that's the beauty of it. You could have ten different people write poems about love for a theme, and they'd all come up with different things.

There isn't really one true answer, it's more of all opinions that have valid statements to back them up. I disagree with you a little on the fact that prose is more strict. Sure, prose has grammar rules and everything of the like, but what else really is there that isn't subjective? Characters, plot, flow, pacing, all subjective things, though things like grammar have rules to follow in prose.

The fact of the matter is, you can't really review poetry objectively, but you /can/ review it subjectively while giving valid statements to back up your argument. For example, someone could say that "The waves that licked and started to devour the boat." is better than, "The waves started to sink." and they could explain why they think so, and most would probably agree that the first is better.

Very interesting topic that you're brought up, I wanted to note. Tackle my ideas if you want, because I want to hear what you have to say.

Like @Kaos said, there really isn't one true answer. Poetry by itself, is ambiguous, any form of literary work is. Everything is opened to interpretation, so that when we read a work we inevitably apply our coloured lens to it without even noticing it.

You say there is no right and wrong in poetry, but there is no right and wrong in prose, or in novels. There is never any right and wrong, things like rhyme, rhythm, imagery, symbolism, are just tools to help you to shape up to your own interpretation. It will ultimately still be your interpretation, however, there are things you can do minimise of being too subjective.

Kaos has already mentioned one of them, back up whatever claim you're making. If you think the poet is narrating too much, or the rhythm is off, or they're using too much imagery. Back it up with the 'why' and 'how'. Saying, 'I don't like you're doing this because it gets on my nerves' is a personal opinion not a critique.

As human beings, we're quick to leap to generalisations and assumptions. When you read a poem, as you read you'd have a rough interpretation of your poem. Great, don't stop there. If you think this particular line is cliche, ask yourself why you thought that it was cliche, if so, why did the author use it, what were they trying to convey. To review, to critique is a process of understanding the author's intention and context, and then try and offer insights as to how they can go about expressing that intention in a better way.

I'll leave you with this quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein, 'we cannot make a proposition about the world; we can only make a proposition about another proposition about the world.' We live in a world of language, poetry is language, when we view language the penumbra of our own narratives will always shadow whatever we are trying to see. Sometimes, objectivity isn't necessarily a good thing, it's too technical and mechanical and poetry as such is made to express the opposite.

Prose is much easier to review because it is strict, toned, and disciplined in its form.

Since art was mentioned and poetry was likened to a painting, I thought I'd add that the thing about a good painting (the same as a good poem) is that it is ALSO strict, toned, and disciplined in its form. Perhaps the fact that they don't appear so, is what makes them so beautiful.

People think that artists when they paint, it just appears out of no where from the top of their imaginations and that they can paint absolutely anything and everything that they would like to, but the act of painting is about strict discipline and practice and breaking up the vision of what you see into triangles, rectangles, circles, and odd angles and lines at different widths and copying every minute twitch movement from your eye and what you're seeing to your hand and what you're painting. It takes a lot of time, hard work and dedication.

It's about challenging the fact that in your head you know the grass is "green" but what you see in front of you is more like blends and mixtures of yellows and browns; blacks and light and shadow and highlights and so you utilize keen and intense observation, with slow and tedious practice and precision to create a thing.

The end may appear as though someone just *poofed* their brainchild onto a canvas, but in actuality was hours upon hours of work and labor.

Poetry is like that with words. Sometimes we want to write about a cool story that happened during lunch time, and we think back to those moments and break it up--maybe not into shapes, but into second-by-second recollections: What did that moment smell like? What did it sound like? What did it feel like? How did my feelings change? How can I best capture or express this moment to mere words, so that I may share it also with my readers?

Or perhaps, we want to write not a recollection, but a feeling or a thought. Sometimes you come home and you see the dust particles in the air and you feel a pang in your heart and you don't know why you are crying right now, you are not bored or depressed or sad in anyway and you write it down for some peace and learning.

Finding the *right* words can be a brutal process. Artists have it easier in this way- they take something physical-- paint, charcoal, clay and they mold and transform and remake that thing into a PAINTING or art piece. Poets, we don't have paints or physical things at our disposal, we have words, which are abstract things and we must make something real out of these abstract, strange sounds that play in our heads that somehow make sense in our minds and can affect us - make us cry, or fear, or anguish, or love.

Now, reviewing such a thing? Apricity and Kaos said it best, it's about reflecting on how the piece affected you and why. Look into how it is doing what it is doing and where exactly in the piece it does the thing that it is doing to you. Or perhaps you felt nothing at all, and then you should wonder why this piece doesn't do anything to you. Then read other's reviews. See if you agree, don't agree, or have something to add or expand upon. The best you can do is to be honest.

When I started reviewing poetry, it looked kind of like:

Wow, I loved this! The ending shocked me! Don't change anything.

I then began to look at people's grammar and easy things to point out about a piece. Perhaps they misplaced a comma, forgot a capitalization, or left out a period.

Then, I began reading other people's reviews and kind of learning from what they did. I would say something like: This piece left me confused in the beginning because I wasn't sure who was speaking here. I thought it was "you" but then it changed to "the girl" and I got confused. I thought from the title "Love" that the piece was going to be about romance, but at the end, I'm not sure what it was about at all, perhaps you can clarify for me?

And then I started noticing patterns. Trends. Practices. Techniques. Pretty soon I was able to answer some of my own questions and leave more suggestions of my own. "Hey, the beginning here could work better with some vivid words - 'snow' and 'winter' are kind of general and bland.

And that is how you review poetry. It is a process just like the act of writing poetry is a process. But the best you can do is be honest with how *you* react to a work. Don't just tell an author you loved the piece if you really felt nothing at all. Also, if you feel a certain emotion about the piece, try to find where in the poem you felt that way and indicate that in your review. Eventually, you'll start noticing patterns to your reactions, and may eventually help analyze a piece further.

One last thing to add: reviewing a poem shouldn't be about answering whether the poem is "good" or "bad", those are useless measurements, also it's what gets you into a load of trouble because you get caught up in subjectivity. Reviewing a poem should always be about your relationship with that poem. Perhaps your relationship with such a poem was short and forgettable, perhaps you wanted to print it out and frame it, but your reaction for the writer means everything.

See, prose has less objectivity than you think.

My rule for writing is "you can do anything you want as long as you make it work." Grammar rules exist to have writing make sense, but if you can make writing make sense without grammar rules, then more power to you.

My main metric for reviewing anything is "does it stir something." If I feel anything at all from the story, then there's something of a right direction. Now, sometimes that thing is sheer disbelief and that tends to be the wrong direction, but hey, they made an impression.

For me, poetry has no right answer. Even poetry that is utterly forgettable to me was probably something others remember through years. It's up to the person. And for me, the best thing that ever happened to my reviewing was forgetting the concept of "objective" and just focusing on improving what was already there. People have great ideas, different styles, and none of them are better than the other. It's just the piece and my opinion, and it's really freeing to know I could be dead wrong.

(slr, felt terrible and was busy these last few days)

I just took a nap and OMGWTF THERE ARE FOUR LONG REPLIES

First of all, thank you @Kaos, @Apricity, @Audy, and @Rosendorn for coming in and answering this question. It's nice knowing that not only did you guys simply respond, but you also poured out a lot of yourselves into this one.

*but before we proceed, a quick word on prose and poetry and paintings*

What I meant by prose is stricter than poetry is that there is so much more to be objective about in prose than in poetry. There are so many rules to take into account in prose. If you don't present it this way, or if it doesn't follow the rules of grammar, or if you missed a period, you will get called out for that. Reviewing prose for proper grammar and mechanics is also very objective; you just have to scan for errors, and if there is one, there's no excusing it.

In poetry, there's none of that. That's why I believe prose is a lot stricter than poetry in its form.

I'd also like to challenge @Audy's statement on paintings. Good paintings aren't necessarily strict, toned and disciplined in its form/how it looks on the surface. It can be if the artist wants to, but in general, every painting is a white canvas (metaphorically). Suppose I just splatter shades of red at a white canvas without a care in the world. Hours after it dries, a painting will emerge. It is a painting. Though not at all strict, toned or disciplined in its form or in its production, it can be a beautiful painting.

*end of quick word*

Actually, I actually knew the answer to this question. I knew that somehow, the answer is no. It was just the "why" and the alternative solution I was looking for. Now, I think my doubts have been confirmed thanks to you guys.

No, you can't review poetry objectively. But you can give your interpretations on the poem, provided that there is solid evidence in the poem to back it up.

Not only that, I learned some pretty nice stuff about poetry, like the importance of the relationship between the reader and the poet. Hopefully with this, I can appreciate poetry more and start to actually review it seriously.

So once again, thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. It's been a good time learning some more about poetry. I feel this thread's been successful.

*one extra question doe*

So, what exactly is "reviewing?" It's a pretty vague word, to be honest. For me, it was scanning a work for errors, then calling it out. I'm pretty sure that's how a lot of us thought of it back when we were newbies. But here, reviewing poetry was all about giving your thoughts and interpretations of this particular poem.

I want to define the word "review" (in our context) once and for all. What does the word "review" mean? What does it mean to "review?" What is the full extent or boundaries of the act of "reviewing" in our context?

A review is defined for me as critical feedback to the writer telling them what their reader sees. Basically, it's a way for us to hear from our readers, and as reviewers it's not really our job to spell out all of their errors so much as spell out our personal experiences on the piece. If you are reading just for errors you're not really doing a review, you're grading it. We much prefer to think of it as how I was taught what a critique was. For me, I take reviewing as developing concrete statements that can provide a writer with something to move forward towards.

For example, if someone wrote a poem I really disliked, or that had a lot of spelling errors, I wouldn't just say "I disliked this" and move on or correct their spelling and move on, I'd go into details like "The flow didn't work for my preferences" and from there make a challenge or something to encourage them to explore that side of writing.

Personally, while I can see how poetry could be seen completely as a subjective thing to review, I don't see it as "unruled" as you do. There are plenty of guidelines to poetry that people choose to follow or not follow, just like with painting.

For instance, your example of a splatter painted red? Well unless you had highlights and lowlights, good composition so it's not centered, and some white space to rest the eyes, your splatter painting wouldn't look good alone. It might work for a background, but not a subject matter. As a painter, I have run into numerous backgrounds that I expected to just be abstract subject matters, and it didn't work out that way. If a painting is too flat, and doesn't lead the eye around, then it is boring and needs something more.

But back to the subject at hand, I think there can be some objectivity to reviewing poetry too. If you're reviewing a structured poem, there are certain rules that those structures should follow, and if they don't, then they have to have enough of a suggestion of them to be considered structured.

The same thing goes with stanzas, line breaks, and punctuation, capitalization, and other such things. While they aren't rules to have or not have at all times in poetry, the poem itself creates the rules for the rest of the poem in the first stanza or few lines. If you get through the first sentence and there aren't any apostrophes, commas, or periods where there should be, then the rest of the poem should follow through. That's not an objective thing, just a consistency and presentation matter.

One of the most interesting things about the argument that "poetry has no rules" is that if you look at why, it doesn't really follow through.

Rules in grammar and punctuation, for instance, are there to be formal and develop a similarity between both the reader and the writer. They used to be all over the place. Even spelling was subjective to the individual! Once those were standardized, the only reason you wouldn't follow those standards would be because you wanted to use an old-school feeling for your poem or writing, such as Milton or Spencer. Today, because they are standardized, ignoring the rules of grammar means that we are being deviant, or going against the norm. At least, that's what it used to mean.

As a poet who is trying to create a feeling, sometimes the feeling you want to create is something that's rebellious, or distraught, and one way we can convey that is to ignore these rules, so in the end, it's less of a choice about what the writer wants to write with, and more of a choice of how the writer wants to present themselves. Do they want to present themselves against the standard rules of language we have today or do they want to be a part of a certain group such as those who don't capitalize? What they choose to do, or not to do, makes a difference.