Reading this wonderful article by Ben Lerner reminded me of a conversation between Ezra Klein and Tracy K. Smith, the former U.S. Poet Laureate. Ezra admitted that he had often tried to read poetry but always gave up because he couldn’t understand it. He asked, in essence, why can’t poets just say what they mean directly, instead of circling around it?
That is a feeling many readers share. Poetry can feel cryptic, inaccessible, and even a little self-indulgent. I used to think the same way until I heard Tracy K. Smith say something that changed my perspective:
“I feel like poetry is a language that sits really close to feelings that defy language. Poetry kind of nudges some of our feelings of joy or confusion or desire toward feelings that we can recognize and describe. I take solace in the fact that it’s poems that we turn to in big moments of change—like the loss of someone, a marriage, or the birth of a child—because poems are resourceful in finding terms that remind us of what we live with but don’t always bring to speech.”
That idea—that poetry reaches toward what can’t quite be said—stayed with me. It also reminded me of Ada Limón, another U.S. Poet Laureate, who once said on NPR’s Fresh Air:
“I think that poetry allows us to hold all of those realities and make space for the full spectrum of not just human emotion, but the full spectrum of truths.”
Both these lines capture what poetry tries to do, but they also hint at why poetry frustrates beginners. It is trying to articulate what resists articulation.
The Paradox of Poetic Failure
This is the context in which I read Ben Lerner’s On Disliking Poetry. Drawing on the critic Allen Grossman, Lerner argues that every poem is, by definition, a failure. A poet begins with a transcendent impulse, a vision of beauty or truth that feels infinite, but must express it in the finite material of language. There is always a gap between what the poet wants to say and what words can hold. So every poem becomes a record of failure, the infinite squeezed into the limits of syntax and sound.
Lerner gives examples: Rimbaud and George Oppen, who both abandoned poetry (one permanently, one for decades), acknowledging the impossibility of the task. Even a master like Keats, who came closest to the ideal, admits the same tension:
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.”
Even Emily Dickinson’s dissonant verses—her broken rhythms, slant rhymes, and visual oddities—show that struggle between potentiality and actuality. She writes at the edges of what can be said, pushing against the neatness of poetic form.
Lerner also points to the avant-garde, who dislike poetry not for being bad but for not being radical enough. They want poems to explode into revolution, but poems stubbornly remain artworks. They are bombs that never go off.
That, I think, is Lerner’s larger point: poetry’s failure is also its essence. Poems always fall short, but that failure is what keeps the desire for the genuine alive. The very act of disliking poetry is itself a kind of belief in poetry’s unrealized promise.
Why We Keep Declaring Poetry Dead
As Lerner writes:
Many cultural critics, with a kind of macabre glee, proclaim ‘the death of poetry’ every few years: our imaginative faculties, we fear, have atrophied; the commercialisation of language seems complete. The actual number of poems being written and read – a decade ago, James Longenbach reported there were more than 300,000 websites devoted to poetry – appears to be irrelevant to the certification of poetry’s death, because what the pronouncement reflects is less an empirical statement about poems than a cultural anxiety about our capacity for ‘alternative making’ or a longing for (an impossible, supposedly lost) universalism.
The anxiety isn’t really about whether poems are being written. It’s about whether we still have the capacity for alternative ways of seeing and being.
Great poets disdain the limits of actual poems, tactically defeat or at least suspend that actuality, sometimes quit writing altogether, becoming celebrated for their silence; bad poets unwittingly provide a glimmer of virtual possibility via the radicalism of their failure; avant-garde poets hate poems for remaining poems instead of bombs and nostalgists hate poems for failing to do what they wrongly, vaguely claim they once did.
There are varieties of interpenetrating demands subsumed under the word ‘poetry’—to defeat time, to still it beautifully; to express irreducible individuality in a way that can be recognised socially or, like Whitman, to achieve universality by being irreducibly social, less a person than a national technology; to propound a measure of value beyond money, to defeat the language and value of existing society.
But one thing all these demands share is that they can’t ever be fulfilled with poems. Hating on actual poems, then, is often an ironic if sometimes unwitting way of expressing the persistence of the demand of Poetry. The jeremiads are defences, protecting the urgency and purity of the poetic impulse toward alterity from the merely real.
Why This Matters
I rescued this essay because it reframes frustration with poetry not as a personal failing but as an encounter with poetry’s essential nature. The gap between what poetry promises and what it delivers isn’t a bug—it’s the feature. That gap keeps us reaching for what language can’t quite hold.
In an age of algorithmic certainty and ChatGPT summaries, poetry’s refusal to resolve into clear meaning feels more necessary than ever. It reminds us that some things resist paraphrase, that ambiguity isn’t always a problem to solve, and that failure can be generative.
If you’ve ever felt frustrated reading a poem, you’re not missing something. You’re feeling exactly what poetry is designed to make you feel: the ache of reaching for the unheard melody.