If there's one thing Emily Dickinson knew for sure, it was what a good poem should do. "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry," she wrote.

Dickinson was attempting to describe for her sister-in-law the power of poetry to envelop and even to devastate the reader (or listener). Her physical description was an effort to convey that successful poems are not effete passages or bookish exercises; they are chillingly annihilating. They have the power to alter us irrevocably.

Poetry, the Belle of Amherst knew, is that form of communication in which words are never simple equivalents of experience or perception. The words themselves, the words as words, have a life as sounds, as images, as the means for generating a series of associations.

Contemporary poet and critic Ann Lauterbach claims that "For poets, the world is apprehended as language... Every object in the world is simultaneously itself and its word." It is impossible to put too much weight on the importance of each individual word. Yet, paradoxically, poetry is that art form in which what is unsaid is often as important---or more important--than what is said. And, to the bewilderment of some, it is a literary genre in which the voice, the tone, the texture, and the poetic form--that is, the way of saying what the poem is saying--are also fundamental parts of what is being said.

* Poets are certainly not the only writers to concern themselves with the simultaneous life of language as symbol and as nonreferential but it is poets who most seem to insist on seeing and hearing words as if each is a multi-faceted gem that has, in the hands of the skillful artist, the capacity to resonate and to go in multiple directions at once.

Take, for example, the lines that begin the Wallace Stevens poem, "The Course of a Particular":

Today the leaves cry, hanging on branches swept by wind, Yet the nothingness of winter becomes a little less. It is still full of icy shades and shapen snow.

Syntactically, the lines are constructed like direct prose statements. Yet, we know that leaves do not, in fact, cry. We recognize that we are dealing with language used imaginatively, language used to do something other than simply deliver a message.

We recognize immediately that mood will be part of what we derive from the poem and that the images--wind, winter, icy shades, snow, leaves crying--will be part of the way the poem says what it wants to say.

We recognize in words like still, shades, and shapen snow, a recurrent "s" sound. Looking back over the first two lines we hear additional "s" sounds in the endings of the words leaves, branches, nothingness, becomes, less, and shades.

The repetition of "win" in wind and winter is the repetition of a sound that requires us to blow out as wind itself blows.

In poetry, the sounds, shadings, color, and associative values of the words are every bit as important as the specific denotative meanings. This does not mean that the language of poetry is imprecise.

On the contrary, there is absolutely nothing arbitrary about a poet's choice of vocabulary or about the manner in which the poet arranges and juxtaposes the words selected. There is nothing superfluous in poems that work.

* The reason many readers keep their distance from poetry is probably best captured by the observation of a student who wrote, "The trouble with poems is they start out to be about one thing, and then they end up being about something else." What the student understood is that part of the magic of poetry is its ability to sustain multiple levels of meaning, to be at once literally what it seems to be and also to exist, because of the power of suggestion, on a figurative level. What is frustrating to her is the richness and texture of a successful poem. What she thinks she would like is a straightforward description in which everything is laid out clearly.

It is the misperception that poems ought to be easy to apprehend that leads so many beginning poets to mistrust the powers of allusion and suggestion and to err by telling all. They bore readers and deny them the thrill of discovery. In addition, they often believe that ambiguity is some kind of writing sin and fail to see that, in fact, intentional ambiguity can be the source of irony, humor, foreboding, and thematic weight in a poem.

If there were a single question that might be a productive springboard to the creation of richer poems, it might well be this: Have I wholly engaged the imagination of my readers by creating the path we shall traverse together and then purposefully stopped short on it, allowing the reader to go on without me?

There is, of course, no single solution to the question of how to write effectively, but I am inclined to trust Marianne Moore's observation in her poem, "Bowls": "Only so much colour shall be revealed as is necessary to the picture."

Copyright of The Writer is the property of The Writer, Inc. and its content may not be copied without the copyright holder's express written permission except for the print or download capabilities of the retrieval software used for access. This content is intended solely for the use of the individual user.