Poetry occupies a unique position in our artistic landscape, for it is an intimate form of expression that creates bridges between individual experiences. The practice of rating, ranking and judging poetry through contests and formal criticism has become commonplace, and central to high school English, festivals and university arts degrees in literature, and yet this approach fundamentally misunderstands, I argue, what makes poetry valuable. This essay examines the arguments surrounding poetry evaluation systems and contests, ultimately making the case that such frameworks undermine the intensely personal nature of poetic exchange.

At its heart, poetry operates as a conversation between poet and reader/hearer. When we encounter a poem that moves us, we experience a moment of recognition or a feeling that someone else has articulated something we’ve felt but perhaps never expressed. This connection transcends so-called objective quality markers and rests firmly in the realm of personal resonance. As Eagleton (2007) argues in his comprehensive examination of poetic traditions, poetry creates profound connections between disparate experiences, allowing for shared understanding across different contexts, including cultural contexts. My short poem “Soft” exemplifies this quality, offering a text that invites multiple interpretations through its allusive use of language, and has evoked a plethora of reactions when used in teaching literacy for students in initial teacher education. It is not the technical structure or other poetic techniques but the potential for engagement and meaning making that gives this poem its educational value.

Soft

Soft it sits.

Soft as lover’s breath.

Soft it sits on hungry hearts that long for more but expect less.

Soft it lays across the pain, across the scars of life’s abandonments.

Soft with comfort in its eternal bed; soft with mercy in unexpected ways.

Soft it is.

Soft.

 

The conventional argument for rating poetry centres on the notion of craft. Proponents maintain that certain technical elements such as rhythm, metaphor, imagery, structure can be objectively assessed, critiqued or measured. They suggest that evaluation helps distinguish technically proficient work and establishes standards that can guide emerging poets. Fenton (2003) contends that these assessment frameworks provide necessary scaffolding for developing writers, offering clear benchmarks against which to measure growth. Competitions, from this perspective, motivate excellence and recognise mastery of form.

Furthermore, supporters argue that awards and rankings provide visibility for poets in a crowded literary marketplace. Recognition through established contests can launch careers, secure publishing opportunities, and attract readers who might otherwise never discover certain voices. In an environment where poetry books rarely become bestsellers, such attention can make meaningful differences to poets’ livelihoods. Gould (2010) documented how winning major literary prizes significantly increased sales and public recognition for previously overlooked poets, suggesting tangible benefits to competitive frameworks.

I certainly acknowledge the need to recognise the works of poets and to give space for emerging poets to be seen. Yet these arguments overlook a fundamental characteristic of poetry: its power derives not from technical perfection but from authentic connection. Consider a technically flawless poem that might be technically sophisticated but honestly leaves you cold, versus a roughly hewn verse that somehow captures exactly what you’re feeling and speaks to your soul and your circumstances. Which has more value? Orr (2011) explores this tension in his research on reader response to contemporary poetry, finding that emotional resonance consistently outweighed technical considerations in readers’ valuation of poems. The answer varies for each reader, rendering attempts at standardised evaluation inherently flawed.

The film Dead Poets Society powerfully illustrates this tension. When John Keating tears out the textbook pages that attempt to rate poetry on a graph, he rejects the very premise that poetry can be measured mathematically. “We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race,” Keating declares, positioning poetry not as a technical achievement but as an exploration of what it means to be alive. This fictional moment reflects a genuine pedagogical debate within literature education about how we teach students to engage with poetry (Parini, 2008).

Poetry contests particularly exemplify the limitations of evaluation systems. Judges, regardless of their expertise, bring their own tastes, experiences and biases. What moves one judge leaves another unmoved. The preferentiality inherent in poetry appreciation means that contest results often reveal more about the judges than about any manifestly objective poetic merit. Gioia (2004) analysed decades of major poetry prize decisions, revealing significant inconsistencies and demonstrating how judging trends reflected shifting cultural politics rather than stable notions of quality. The history of major literary prizes is littered with controversies and reversals of opinion, demonstrating the instability of these judgements.

Poststructuralist theory offers valuable insight here. Roland Barthes has argued that meaning isn’t fixed within a text but created through the reader’s engagement with it (Barthes, 1977). The “death of the author” concept suggests that once written, a poem belongs as much to its readers as to its creator. Each reading becomes a unique literacy event, generating meanings the poet might never have imagined. Such an experience has happened to me across the years with using the poem “Soft”. Culler (2011) extends this thinking to contemporary poetry practices, arguing that poems function as sites of possibility rather than fixed artistic products. If meaning itself is fluid and cocreated, how can we possibly establish fixed criteria for evaluation?

Moreover, the institutional frameworks surrounding poetry assessment often perpetuate elitism. They create artificial literary hierarchies that can distance poetry from everyday readers. When poetry becomes something that requires expert validation, it distances itself from its historical roots as an art form for everyone. Van Toorn (2006) documents how Aboriginal song poems have historically functioned as community knowledge systems without requiring academic validation, highlighting alternative models of poetic value. Throughout thousands of years of human history, poetry has served communities as ritual, celebration, protest and remembrance, not as material for expert assessment. In the contemporary world poetry has divested itself of stuffy elitism to be found in song lyrics and forms of performance that are offered for everyone through popular culture.

Developing ranking systems also problematically suggests that poems compete against one another, as though literary achievement were a sporting event. This framing misrepresents how we humans as thinking, sensorial beings experience poetry. We don’t read poems to determine winners; we read them to be moved, challenged, and connected. Different poems serve different purposes and speak to different experiences. Comparing them often becomes an exercise in false equivalence. My poem “Soft” exemplifies this principle because its value lies not in how it might rank against other poems but in its capacity to evoke diverse responses and create space for personal meaning making among readers.

Critics of evaluation systems and literary criticism also note how poetry contests can homogenise rather than diversify voices. When poets write with judges in mind, they may consciously or unconsciously tailor their work toward established preferences. The result can be technically accomplished but emotionally cautious poetry that fails to push boundaries or challenge conventions. There may be clear patterns of self-censorship among poets attempting to align with perceived judging preferences. Truly revolutionary poetic voices have often been initially rejected by established gatekeepers precisely because they departed from recognised standards that existed at the time.

Poetry’s most essential function may be its ability to articulate what feels inexpressible. Its power lies in evoking emotional responses that transcend logical or literary analysis. When we attempt to measure such responses through ratings or rankings, we inadvertently diminish what makes poetry vital, and we forget that poetry is not about logical and rational thinking (which is the territory of technical prose and formal and scientific genres) but about the diversity of embodied experience in the world that contain universality and are idiosyncratic. We must not transform an art of evocation into a technical exercise. Hirshfield (2015) characterises this quality as poetry’s “ineffability”—its capacity to communicate what other writing forms cannot, a quality vividly demonstrated in my poem “Soft,” which brings out precisely this ineffable quality that defies measurement.

Alternative approaches exist. Poetry circles where works are shared without competitive frameworks allow for authentic response without hierarchical judgement. Community poetry events that celebrate diverse voices rather than selecting winners create space for poetry as connection rather than competition. Digital platforms that allow readers to discover poetry based on personal resonance rather than critical acclaim offer pathways to meaningful engagement outside traditional evaluation systems. Zapruder (2017) documents the rise of these alternative poetry communities, noting their emphasis on inclusion and connection over competition and assessment.

None of this suggests that thoughtful critical engagement with poetry lacks value. Conversation about what poems do and how they affect us enriches our reading experience. But such conversation differs fundamentally from numerical ratings or competitive rankings, which reduce complex aesthetic experiences to simplified metrics or sets of literary categories. Vendler (2015) distinguishes between evaluative and responsive criticism, advocating for approaches that prioritise personal affective engagement over judgment.

Ultimately, the most meaningful measure of a poem’s worth may be its ability to endure in individual memory and become part of how someone understands their life and experiences. This deeply personal impact cannot be quantified, ranked or rated. It exists in the dialogic space between poet and reader/listener, unique to each encounter with the text (Bakhtin, 1981). Consider William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” with its familiar lines: “I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales and hills, / When all at once I saw a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils” (Ferguson et al., 2022, p. 127). For generations, this poem has been taught in classrooms with formulaic, sentimental interpretations that reduce it to mere pastoral prettiness or simplistic celebrations of nature’s beauty. Yet I have rediscovered it as a profound ecopoem that speaks directly to my existential concerns about our relationship with nature and the planet’s future.

Through this contemporary ecological lens, Wordsworth’s observations of the daffodils “fluttering and dancing in the breeze” (Ferguson et al., 2022, p. 127) become a poignant reminder of what we stand to lose in our increasingly threatened natural world. The poem thus becomes fresh and compelling even though it was written more than two centuries ago, demonstrating how poetic resonance transcends time when readers bring their lived experiences to the text. My poem “Soft” continues to facilitate meaningful literacy experiences for successive cohorts of students, for its value lies not in critical acclaim but in its capacity to create space for fresh personal meaning making among culturally diverse readers/hearers.

Poetry at its most powerful challenges us to move beyond systems of measurement altogether. It invites us into experiences that defy categorisation and evaluation, creating what Bakhtin (1981) describes as a “dialogic space” where meaning emerges through relationship rather than through fixed metrics. In an era obsessed with quantification, poetry stands as a necessary counterbalance, reminding us that some of the most meaningful aspects of human experience resist ranking or reduction to numerical values. They can only be felt, shared and recognised in their fullness, in their complexity, in their ability to transform both writer and reader. When we attempt to constrain poetry through contests, ratings and competitive structures, we diminish its capacity to surprise, to challenge, to comfort and to transform. We create barriers to the very intimacy that gives poetry its unique power in human culture. As Hirshfield (2015) argues, poetry offers an increase in available consciousness, enabling us to encounter ourselves and our world with new clarity and depth.

This expansion cannot be measured but is nonetheless tangible in its effects. The paradox of poetry lies precisely in this tension: that something so seemingly ephemeral can create such lasting impact on how we understand ourselves and navigate our lives. By embracing poetry as an art of connection rather than competition steeped in literary or aesthetic analysis, we honour its true capacity to illuminate what it means to be human. We acknowledge that its value lies not in how it ranks against other poems but in how it enters our lives, changes our perceptions and remains with us through time. As my own experience with Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” demonstrates, even the most familiar poems can be reborn through new contexts and concerns, speaking across centuries to contemporary anxieties and hopes. This living quality of poetry, this its ability to evolve alongside us, to respond to our changing world while maintaining its essential humanity, is precisely the failure of systems of evaluation. In recognising this limitation, we free ourselves to encounter poetry not as critics or judges but as full participants in its ongoing conversation about what matters most in human experience.

References

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (M. Holquist, Ed.; C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). University of Texas Press.

Barthes, R. (1977). Image, music, text (S. Heath, Trans.). Hill and Wang.

Culler, J. (2011). Literary theory: A very short introduction (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Eagleton, T. (2007). How to read a poem. Blackwell Publishing.

Fenton, J. (2003). An introduction to English poetry. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ferguson, M., Salter, M. J., & Stallworthy, J. (Eds.). (2022). The Norton anthology of poetry (6th ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.

Gioia, D. (2004). Disappearing ink: Poetry at the end of print culture. Graywolf Press.

Gould, A. (2010). Beautiful & pointless: A guide to modern poetry. Harper.

Hirshfield, J. (2015). Ten windows: How great poems transform the world. Knopf.

Orr, D. (2011). Beautiful & pointless: A guide to modern poetry. Harper.

Parini, J. (2008). Why poetry matters. Yale University Press.

Van Toorn, P. (2006). Writing never arrives naked: Early Aboriginal cultures of writing in Australia. Aboriginal Studies Press.

Vendler, H. (2015). The ocean, the bird, and the scholar: Essays on poets and poetry. Harvard University Press.

Zapruder, M. (2017). Why poetry. Ecco.