Today we return with a new entry to “Poetry 101”, a short series focused on the fundamentals of poetry, offering universally applicable, generalised advice to budding wordsmiths who are considering penning a verse or two.
As previously established in our last article on types of poetry, there is no correct way to realise your art, and no amount of cutting and sticking advice from renowned writers or highly upvoted posts on r/Poetry is going to skyrocket your work into immortal status. That being said, there is some writing theory- if you will- that you can borrow from in order to lay some foundations for your work.
Today, we’re examining another crucial ingredient that can be found in almost every recipe for poetry; themes.
Themes, themes, themes. Literature is rife with them; authors, playwrights and poets alike will weave different themes into their writing to tie everything together and to give wider meaning to their stories.
Thankfully, there are a plethora of common, debatably inexhaustible themes that any budding poet can pick and choose from. These are very often broad, complex and nuanced subjects, consequently meaning there are hundreds of angles to tackle them from. Let’s examine some to see if we can get the creative juices flowing.
1). Love
Love is, perhaps predictably, the top of the list when it comes to themes in poetry. No surprises there, as love itself is very broad. There are many kinds of love; romantic, familial, love of a friend or of a pet, love of a place, time, hobby, you name it. Also, love isn’t exclusive to poems of devotion or celebration, it can also rear its head in much more tragic and heart-breaking writing, particularly when married with the subjects of death, rejection or unrequited affection.
2). Death
Speaking of death, here he comes, adorned in a black cloak and clutching a scythe, galloping into the literary world on the back of a pale horse. Like love, death touches us all in some way, and as is the way with the things that move us, it makes its way into a lot of different art forms. Poetry about death is very common indeed, so much so that there is a whole style of poetry dedicated to lamenting the dead; the elegy.
3). Nature
The natural world and its many wonders have long served as muses for poets and writers. Many poets over the centuries have written verse dedicated to nature, from things as grand and poignant as the destruction of the environment following the advent of the Industrial Revolution (see William Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much With Us”), to something as simple as a dedicational poem to an animal or location, in the case of works such as Robert Burns’ “To A Mouse”, or William Butler Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”.
4). Identity
The self has always been a prevalent theme in literature, and one great thing about it is that it can be intensely personal. The theme of identity covers many bases; cultural identity, geographical identity, how identity is affected by mental illness, sexuality, gender, neurodiversity, interests, upbringing, and many more. Writing a poem about identity often demands quite a bit of gall, as it can require you to be vulnerable and candid with your words, but you can end up with something largely unique when all is said and done.
5). Coming of Age
Coming-of-age is a theme so popular that it could even be considered a literary genre, or subgenre at the very least. There are countless books, films, songs and poems that tell stories centred around riding the confusing rollercoaster that is the transition into adulthood. From “Jane Eyre” to “The Catcher in the Rye” to “Looking for Alaska”, profound works of literature centred on the subject span several centuries. Poetry can be more specific than full-length novels, often scrutinising individual aspects of coming of age: first loves, feeling alienated, mental illness and the relationships you form.
