This article introduces my approach to composing poetry and why I developed it in the way that I did.
A reasonable question for a reader to ask is, “Should I care?” The best answer is to judge the tree from its fruit. And so, to start at the end, if you are curious please check one or more of the below, or other of my poems on PoetrySoup.
The River of Life (a Poem of the Day winner), Enduring Love, Remnant, Sorrow’s Children, Persephone Creates the Seasons, When Gods Immortal War, Hades, We Who Will Not Last the Day.
Or, on a lighter note, The Pigeons of Trafalgar, Pharaoh, Aruba.
If this is not your cup of tea, certainly, life provides many good things to do besides reading this article.
If you are still reading, I will tell you how I composed these poems, and how you can compose poems like them if you are so inclined. But I warn you in advance, you may not like the answer.
The origins of my approach to poetry lie with Homer.
For general background on life, I read the sixty volumes of the Great Books of the Western World series (second edition) in their entirety. Focusing on the literary part of this collection for current purposes, there is a sharp drop in the quality of composition when moving from the first works, those of Homer, to the next, those of Aeschylus. It is like going from a warm bath to ice water. And throughout the rest of the series, to the mid-20th century, the water never quite warms up again. Shakespeare, in my opinion, is second in quality after Homer, but it is a distant second.
In pondering why the first is still the best, at least in my opinion, the question arises of what was different about Homer. The most obvious difference between Homer and later writers is that they were writers and Homer was not. Composing during or just after the Greek Dark Ages, when writing was lost, the whole of Homer’s epic poems not only had to be held in his memory, they had to be transmitted verbally into the memories of his successors.
This leads to the suspicion that there was something about Homer’s compositional method itself, of holding his poems entirely in memory, that contributed at least partially to the extraordinary quality of his work.
This is a plausible idea. Memory is a kind but thorough editor. It never criticizes; it instead quietly shortens and smooths. So that the constraint that a poem has to be held in memory can serve to improve its quality.
Indeed, I suspect it will turn out that the biology of forgetting is much more sophisticated than that of remembering. Humans are the animals that mastered abstraction. Abstraction is essentially forgetting things that don’t matter. So, it may well be that forgetting is central to how we think.
To test this line of thought, I composed two epic poems in the method of Homer, holding them entirely within memory throughout the compositional process. One might think this requires an exceptionally good retentive capability for poetry. It does not, and in fact such a capability would render Homer’s technique useless. One does not strain memory to hold the poem; one instead forces the poem to be easily memorable.
Which leads naturally to the very practical question for this technique: “What makes a poem memorable?” My conclusion, based on extensive experience, is that primarily a poem is memorable to the extent that it produces a genuine emotional response.
This is true not only of the poem as a whole, it is also true at every single line. So that the poem is remembered by feeling the emotion at each individual point in the poem, and then the emotional transition to the next point, with the words themselves attached in memory to this emotional cascade. During composition, there is an interaction between words arising from the subconscious to meet the requirements of the emotional flow, and the emotional flow itself responding to the words that arise.
Once this approach is mastered, there is nothing inherently more difficult about remembering an epic than a ten-line poem. An epic simply requires more time and patience. By analogy, when one knows how to walk ten feet, walking a mile is not a fundamentally more difficult task.
An advantage of composing a poem in memory is that it becomes a part of you in a much deeper and more permanent way than a poem that has to be read to be recalled. In my case, something over half of the poems that I have posted to PoetrySoup (as of March, 2025) are extracted from the two epics that I completed over twenty years ago, before moving on to other things. Without having made an attempt to retain them in memory, most of these verses have always stayed with me as interior decoration for my mind.
This article has focused on the role of memory and emotion in the flow and smoothing of a poem. Another topic is contrast, commonality and other factors that shape the architecture of a poem. That may be the subject of a subsequent article.