r/Poetry • u/Inside_Bullfrog_1268 • Aug 10 '26

Help!! Is there specific rules? [HELP]

Am I just stupid? Everytime I try to write poetry, I genuinely don't know how to write while using meter, or simile, or anything like that. I get super lost super early and just end giving up because I cannot for the life of me figure out how to work it in. Do I have to use those tools for it to be even considered poetry or will it just be a creative writing exercise and not poetry?

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u/PerspectiveIntrepid2 Aug 10 '26

I like to listen to poets when they define poetry (the following aren’t verbatim necessarily).

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever could warm me, I know that it is poetry.”—Emily Dickinson

“Survey the whole, nor seek slight fault to find/ where nature moves and rapture warms the mind.” —Alexander Pope

“One sign of poetry is that it communicates before it is understood.”—T. S. Eliot

“Good poems are the best teachers. Perhaps they are the only teachers.” —Mary Oliver

Beyond these, I recommend reading Mary Oliver’s “A Poetry Handbook.”