Reading

The beauty of poetry is that it’s open to interpretation. Yes, some images can only mean one thing, but the best poems mean something different to everyone. That’s not because they’re poorly written, but because we project our own experiences onto what we read.

Poets must make deliberate decisions about every aspect of their poem. Things like a poem’s structure, its title, and even its use of punctuation are deliberate decisions made by the poet to reinforce—or sometimes contradict—the overarching theme or message of the poem.

In this post, we’re going to look at some of the areas you can analyse when reading a poem.