Poetry Was Meant to Be Easy

A reader’s defense in the debate over short, simple poems

Every time a book of short lines and plain words takes over a bookstore’s bestseller table, the same criticism returns: it isn’t poetry, just greeting-card sentiment, and it has no depth. But go back a little in the history of poetry, and you find that poetry was meant to be easy.

Poetry that was song

Much early verse was song that even people who couldn’t read could sing along to. Repeated refrains and simple metaphors were devices to make it easy to remember. Poetry became difficult only after it was printed and became something for a small number of readers.

If only difficult poems are called poetry, poetry belongs to fewer and fewer people.

The threshold of a first poetry book

Easy poems become many people’s first book of poetry, and some of those readers go on to stranger, harder work. A low threshold doesn’t mean no depth; it means many people come in.

There are certainly good poems and bad ones. But the standard should not be whether they are hard or easy. If even a single line has held someone’s day together, that poem has done its job.