What Makes a Short Poem Good
By
Ashley, Elizabeth, Joe, and Devin

In considering what makes a short poem “good,” our group discussed whether the poetic form or structure was an addition to or detraction from the poem’s overall quality, how our personal relationships to a common cultural experience are a factor to the efficacy of the poem, the significance of an emotional response, and the importance of an apparent central theme.  Dealing with poems published over a wide span of time proved difficult to determine each poem’s quality.  Overall, when evaluating the quality of each poem, our group’s responses were quite diverse in most of the questions we each came up with.  To begin, we must consider what poem had the highest overall quality, and that was “Yet Do I Marvel” by Countee Cullen. By highest overall quality we mean, which poem had the highest average score for each question. Despite our different opinions on which poems we each preferred, this poem received a mean total score of 1.85 in the Quality Evaluator process, where one is the highest grade of quality and five correlates to the lowest grade of quality. 

One of the reasons this poem received a high mark was because of its central theme.  Elizabeth, when referring to the question of central theme in all the poems, commented:

“In terms of what makes a short poem good, the group seems to prefer poems with themes we agree with or can relate to personally.  Poems with ambiguous themes or that only apply to a specific cultural group were not rated as highly as those we expressed either a personal connection to or those that we found applicable to all of humanity.”

The question of a central theme really brought into perspective what the poem is trying to convey.  For this poem, Devin was able to define the central theme very clearly, saying, “The central theme revolves greatly around the aspects of marveling on the wonders of being a Black poet, without this central theme, there is no ‘Yet Do I Marvel’.”  This proved to be a distinct quality we came to a consensus on.  Despite the notion that all poems might not have a central theme, in this body of evaluation, thematic ambiguity was among the least accepted characteristics.

Of all the questions we evaluated, one of the most overlooked qualities was poetic form.  One example is in William Shakespeare’s poem, “Sonnet 130,” which epitomizes the traditional and song like form that all poets envy, especially during Shakespeare’s time.  Joe said in his final evaluation:

“You ask yourself, ‘Why did the author write it as a sonnet?’ I think becomes an interesting questions more for Countee Cullen’s poems, as they were written more recently… whereas in Shakespeare’s day sonnets were the common form.”

To add to this, Ashley thought, “Sonnets generally speak to the theme of love; although the love described here is not typical, romantic love, the sonnet form denotes that it is, in fact, still a sort of love.”  Most importantly is the fact that poetry is not confined to a certain specific type of form.  For example, one of our poems called “Lazy Jane” by Shell Silverstein is a free verse poem with one word per line, which is something that poetry is all about, being free in expression.

The diversity in the overall results of the Quality Evaluator indicate that, as a whole, we consider an apparent central theme to be the most important characteristic of the qualities we chose to evaluate, and emotional response and personal relationship to a common cultural experience followed closely behind, while poetic form was the least influential.  In addition to these results, despite the fact that the individual results of the group each found these poems to be very diverse and opinions varied greatly on individual poems among the different members, Quality Evaluator reaches a relatively accurate group consensus.