Eisha Mehtab

Professor Nukhbah Langah

ENGL 404: Poetry 2

28 June, 2022

Saving Poetry from Poetry: A Critique of Rupi Kaur and Modern Poetic Thought

I believe poetry to be in a completely different dimension in literature, a dimension that

reeks of trance, of rhythm, of exploration, of depth, and of feelin, so deeply that you want to float

away reciting the words in your palms because they allow you to understand the emotions that

make you, you. Just like science fiction has infinite worlds made up of different infinite

dimensions, in literature, we have poetry. Most truthfully, to define poetry is to limit it. There is

a certain impossibility in defining poetry precisely because of its innate nature. However, to

understand what makes up poetry and why can some pieces of literature be called poetry is

cautious, careful, and critical labour. The duty of defining poetry is not the putting up of a

barricade to its independence, but a way to conceptualize what poetry should not be. Poetry is

supposed to evoke an imaginative, specific awareness and response which brings out meaning,

along with the rhythmic and aesthetic components of language. This language comprises a few

crucial properties of poetry and poetic thought like acoustics, prosodies, symbolism,

phonaesthetics, and poetic literary devices.

Poetry has had shifts in the way it has been written – and long gone are the traditional

days of muses, myths, and strict adherence to structures. Modernism brought about critiques of

traditional poetry and overturned it by presenting poetry with meanings of their own, full of

imagination, and creativity unlike ever seen before, and the introduction of further vast forms of
poetries in itself, like free verse and concrete poetry to name a couple. However, at some point,

poetry got contaminated with ill structure and loose ends. But what is a good poem and what is a

bad poem? What makes poetry contaminated? Poetry has always had a certain ‘look’ and a

certain ‘sound’ that makes it poetry. Because of the shifts of ‘the isms’, schools of thought, and

movements throughout history, every individual has had a plan for poetry of their own. Perhaps

in this travel from traditionalism to modernism, poetry lost an essence: its incompleteness, its

inadequacy, its lack thereof. To feel a sense of discomfort with poems is okay, to feel confused

and lost within them is okay too but to feel incomplete and wanting for something more is

probably not what any form of literature is supposed to evoke, let alone poetry, given how it is

supposed to move you, inspire you and collect you with its sole purpose: storytelling (Blessler,

14). Poetry with missing features makes it incomplete. Perrine puts this idea as:

the locus of poetry is not to be found in any single technical feature (e.g., meter, rhyme,

beautiful words) but is the product of the interrelationships of [several] language features

(denotations, connotations, images, figures of speech, allusions, patterns of sound and

rhythm, etc.), and that all these features should function together to make a unified whole.

(Perrine, 192)

This paper contends that modernism has brought about a shift in contemporary poetry

that is superficial, frivolous, and one-dimensional, questioning the modernist thought through the

analysis of selected Rupi Kaur’s poems in her books milk and honey and the sun and her flowers.

Healy says in his essay that unless poetry can “retain imagination and a belief in words, it is an

idle pastime” (672). Pierce examined once how there are six contenders that poetry falls under

rhythm, imagery, beauty, unity, strangeness or playfulness and ineffability of meaning. However,

he also said that none of these separate poetry from other forms of literature. Riberio explains his
argument perfectly when he says “While rhythm, imagery, and so forth may be typical features

found in poems, none of them is necessary or sufficient for a text to count as one” (Riberio, 189).

This paper agrees that there is no one feature that all poems must have, but for the sake of

understanding what poetry cannot be, I contend that we must attempt to define what is ubiquitous

in all poems of the world to critique the poetry of today, and to acknowledge that poetry has

reached an era where now it must be saved. The paper will first talk about literature, literary

theory, and poetry and why is a critique of literature needed, and then what insights modernism

followed for poetry from multiple secondary sources. Then, the paper will do a critical poetry

analysis of a contemporary poet Rupi Kaur, who has defined a culture of what today’s poetry has

come to figure out what poetry must not be and also to formalize what it must be.

           Literary criticism is supposed to teach us the best way to be known and thought of in the

world. To describe, study, analyze, justify, interpret and evaluate a work of art is crucial to help

“define our humanity, critique our culture, evaluate our actions” (Blessler, 6) and fall in love

with literary works. In this paper, I will attempt to critique Rupi Kaur’s art to understand

literature, and how parts of it fit the category of literature and how parts of it don’t. Literature is

backed up by the hyper protected cooperative principle (13) to protect the canon of its’ existence,

but mainly what is considered literature, according to Blessler, is (a) anything that is written (b)

to contribute to literature’s chief purpose: storytelling (14). There can never be a concrete

definition of what literature is, what poetry is, or what art is – but to understand what makes up

these terms, there must be a universal thought agreed upon that constitutes all literature.

Literature is anything that intensifies ordinary language and deviates from everyday speech

(Eagleton, 2), but I contend that the real definition of literature remains in the hands of how
somebody reads it and how that somebody relates to that writing, and that definition will keep

changing forever. To attempt to define poetry, well, that is another story.

Indeed, even Wordsworth and T.S. Eliot could not agree on poetry’s definitions. While

poetry is the “spontaneous overflow of powerful thought” for Wordsworth, poetry is not “a

turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion” for Eliot. Historically, we have always

defined art based on its intentions, what the artist chooses to portray to the audience, and how

closely their art attempts to regard the artist’s intention. However, defining what poetry is, is not

the goal, but being able to recognize poetry, that can be done. (Gillespie, 41). Ribeiro has

attempted to define poetry with its intention to repeat, which she describes and defends by saying

that the criterion of beauty will change through time, and our conception of poetry must reflect

the changes of our times but just like the “eighteenth-century poet had to use meter, today’s poet

must take some stand or other toward metrical regularity” because no matter how much poetry

can change, its nature and intentions are “unavoidably bound up with the artistic concerns of

their predecessors” (199). According to Kotin, a bad poem is a poem that seems “lifeless,

indistinct and inauthentic” or a poem that has lines that are “predictable” (194) where we are

being told something we already know. And the best poems according to Bloodaxe anthologists

talk about the “imperatives of the times” that is, the best kind of poetry discovers humanity

through the present world (Lucas, 16). We may say that literature and judgment of poetry is a

subjective experience, but then there would be no point to literary criticism and the study of good

or high literature. There is indeed good literature and there is bad literature. Fysudeen says,

“Poetry isn’t good because it’s simple, and it’s also not good because it’s complex.” Poetry is

good because it interestingly says something interesting, that it is rich in meaning, and it

contributes to something about a larger poetic narrative. (Fysudeen). However, to understand

revolutionized poetry. 

Through the lens of modernism, unconventional stylistic techniques like stream of

consciousness were appreciated, there was a blurring of lines between established structures

among genres, previously established aesthetic theories were thought to be unnecessary and

ambiguity and fragmentation became widespread. Attempting to criticize modernism would not

mean going against every principle it stood for, but it would be criticizing what it turned poetry

into with its vast new stylistics, methods, and techniques. Modernism’s fundamental concept is

that of a poet’s style coming from the nature of what it explores. Ezra Pound said in 1912, “a

man’s rhythm must be interpretative” which is to say, a unique rhythm for a poem is a very core

and free modernist thought (Howarth, 3). It was always in modernism’s interest for new art to

upset the status quo. T. E. Hulme said, “the ideal of all modern prose is to pass to conclusions

without thinking” and most modernist poets agreed because the contemporary world of the time

was a culture of emotional repression, atomization and one-size-fits-all-thinking. To break away

from the chain, modern poetry’s task became to “reharmonise minds and bodies” to awaken

freedom and wholeness. One of Hulme’s lectures also mentioned how modern poetry should

adapt free verse, disjunctive syntax, and opaque techniques for a mystical spiritual unity. Eugene

Jolas said that the “modernist form sought to make poetic language a new conduit for it,

searching for a union of the collective and the individual at the point of the immediate

conscience”. In essence, modernity suffered from a “dissociation of sensibility", a split of

thought from feeling, and consequently what it wanted from art was distortion (Howarth).

Taking the modernism theory and then criticizing Rupi Kaur’s work and not calling it literature

or poetry, in short, would be wrong. However, as already established, to question Rupi Kaur’s
poetry based on the reader’s interpretation and conclude it to be a poetry that no longer excites, is

too simplistic, one-dimensional and everything that poetry should not be, is a literary critic’s

fundamental task.

           Rupi Kaur’s work has been widely criticized for being too simplistic and too easy with

inadequate difficulty. Difficulty over here addresses the aesthetic features of poetry that give

some sort of depth to the poem that the reader has to think and interpret about in order to break

the poem down into specific variable features. There are a vast variety of strategies that can

make a poem more ‘difficult’ and this is crucial for critics and readers alike because of how this

has always been a “central aesthetic priority” (McQuillan, iv) for poetry since the early twentieth

century. A certain form of difficulty adds prestige to poetry and to its literary status - and this is

what the notion of modernism is all about. Because Kaur’s style is so direct and so easy to

interpret, readers cannot dwell on what the poem wants to say. Instead, it's like Kaur has said the

essential thing already in simplistic terms and there is nothing more to think about. This non-

difficulty is frustrating for the readers. As also mentioned earlier, Kaur has disrupted the reader’s

ability “to understand, to interpret, to create meaning from, or to be affected by a text”

(McQuillan, 3).

The forthcoming analysis of Kaur’s poetry is based on three main focuses. The analysis is

based on language, on poetic and literary devices, and on her feminist approaches. The way Kaur

uses language in her poems, in the way she uses grammar and text, capitalization or, better yet,

the lack thereof, and line breaks has been widely criticized. Kaur has mentioned she uses

lowercase exclusively to honor her mother tongue, Punjabi which is written in the Gurmukhi

script, which contains no uppercase letters and no punctuation, other than the period (Cuyana).

This is respectable; however, it has allowed criticism to persist. 

for you / -the first time (Kaur, 58). This poem in her book is an example of the frivolous method

of creating line breaks in her poems that with a traditional right justification to give her poetry a

sense of verse form. One can very easily produce this poem in two sentences: “I am ready for

you. I have always been ready for you.” It’s just a matter of putting breaks in specific stress areas

to create a more appealing effect. Similarly, we have another poem: your voice / alone / drives

me / to tears (Kaur, 124). This poem can be written in a single sentence, “Your voice alone

drives me to tears” and it would make complete sense. However, to make it ‘look’ like a poem,

Kaur introduced line breaks. Again, the reader is not satisfied because of how simplistically it

has been written as. As discussed above, the reader is looking for more to interpret. The reader is

looking to  read. Modernism allows for easy poetry to exist as well as difficult poetry, but the

reader still wants something more, which is missing in Kaur’s words. 

In a post made by Kaur on her Instagram page, a user @soundslikeyogurt criticized the

simplicity and arbitrariness of Kaur’s poetry and the ease with which they believe Kaur

composes her work: “step 1: write a bland sentence. Step 2: press ‘enter’ after basically any word

you want so as to separate into new line. Step 3: Poetry, bitch.” Another user writes, “Ok, but

this is not poetry. It lacks the linguistic resources of poetry. It is just a phrase cut into pieces”

(@pauloavelino22). Another user @oliviacraighead, said, “if you / get bored / just write / some /

fake / rupi kaur / poems / it's fun.” These negative responses to Kaur’s work seek to discredit her

work to be called poetry and then proceeds to exclude it from the status of literature. Majorly, it

is too simple to be taken seriously, because it is disposable and because it is something without

literary value. McQuillian argues that the critics seek to challenge the poetry’s “literariness”. In

an article published in PN Review, Rebecca Watts describes Kaur’s poetry as a departure from
everything that makes poetry artful, as “the complete rejection of complexity, subtlety,

eloquence and the aspiration to do anything well” (Watts). A blog by the University of

Michigan’s says, “Kaur has mastered the art of making her poems seem profound, especially by

capitalizing on the lazy technique of lines breaks” (Fysudeen).

To analyze her poems based on poetic and literary devices, there is a lot of criticism

already discussed on the non-difficulty. Kaur has frequently used anaphora and enjambment in

her poems, and while she has used metaphors and similes in her poems, a majority of her poems

are without any sort of poetic form, structure and device completely. In milk and honey, Kaur

writes: “you were so distant / i forgot you were there at all” (Kaur, 83). The words here are

entirely free of metaphor and the poem is lackluster, subservient, one-dimensional with its

simple and direct expression of emotion. Watts points out this lack of “complexity” when talking

about the type of language being used in Kaur’s poetry. She also points out the lack of “subtlety”

because of the straightforward and direct way Kaur writes about serious topics that can have a lot

of creative potential to be displayed otherwise. McQuillan calls this her “clumsiness” as a poet

(14). She points out the lack of “eloquence” because her poetry lacks complexity or aesthetic

value, which is to say, the lack of poetic devices. (Watts)

In her book the sun and her flowers, she writes: i long to be a lily pad (Kaur, 221). This

poem is a line, and such poems are called monostiches. The critique is not in the method or the

form here, the critique is how modernist poetry characteristics are slowly losing the essence of

poetry, and becoming increasingly one-dimensional. Poetry is a literary form where imaginative

awareness is provoked with a distinctive style, meaning, sound and rhythm. Kaur may ignite our

sensory imagination with ‘lily pad’ and even provide us with meaning for ourselves – but there is

no sound and rhythm we see in most of her poems. She writes on another page in the same book:
never feel guilty for starting again (Kaur, 160). This poem is a piece of advice, invoking no sense

of imagination, sound or rhythm. Her words and this poem may as well have been a quote rather

than be called a poem. To cite a poem from milk and honey: If you are not enough for yourself /

you will never be enough / for someone else. (Kaur, 197). Khaira-Hanks says how “it has the air

of the slurred advice you might overhear at the back of a Wetherspoons.” It only makes sense to

question here why poetry was ever needed in the first place. Why did poetry begin? For what

purpose? If this is poetry, what are sentences? What makes this line poetry and this same line

written in a story, not poetry? Rupi is not doing what poetry was meant to do: to invoke music,

sound, and rhythm into a certain arrangement of words. i long / for you / but you long / for

someone else / i deny the one / who wants me / cause i want someone else / -the human

condition. (Kaur, 39) In this poem, there is no musical touch that poetry was purposed to invoke.

Rather, this poem feels rather bleak, unarranged and underwhelming. Anyone can write poetry

like this, employing a couple of ridiculous teenage thoughts over unrequited loves. What is

unique in Rupi Kaur’s poetry? Is this what modernism meant when the movement stated the will

to be free in expression? 

A user (@questanoepoesia) writes, “these are really nice and touching words but I don’t

see where the poetry is”. While these comments are negative, they are still criticisms and Khaira-

Hanks calls them to be “spot on” in The Guardian (Khaira-Hanks). Watts says that such poems

play a part to “democratize” poetry which is something that can very well threaten the cultural

status of literature and literary criticism in the world to follow if it carries on unchecked. While

modernism has allowed poets the freedom to choose to express themselves in whatever way they

want, having poems like this reshape how contemporary poets could write their poems in the

future, employing short poems, convenient phrases, clumsy pieces of advice with no sense of
rhymical or aesthetic arrangement, taking us farther and farther away from the true essence of

poetry. Another aspect of Kaur’s poetry is how it is so accessible because of social media and

how it has given birth to ‘Instapoets’, which are popularly seen as self-acclaimed poets on the

internet, also widely engaged in lackluster poetry.

To analyze her poem based on her feminist approaches, Kaur has been widely criticized

for simplifying the feminist struggle and collective trauma in her attempts to depict the

“quintessential South Asian female experience” while giving off the impression of being

disingenuous (Giovanni). Critics have mentioned how Kaur is a self-appointed spokesperson for

the South Asian female experience while herself being a privileged woman from the west,

seeking to talk about a colonized country and situation as her own. There is also criticism of her

making profits from her invocation of generational trauma. Her darker poems on rape, abuse, and

misogyny speak more generally about parents/children and men/women, using plural nouns of

“we” and “our”. Her desire to speak for the diaspora and the South Asian community is thus

objected because it makes people from the community uncomfortable. In Jaishree’s article

on Vice, anonymous says “I don’t like how she generalizes the South Asian immigrant

experience to intergenerational trauma, it’s harmful to people like me who come from refugee

communities.” (Jaishree)

In her book the sun and her flowers, she writes: perhaps we are all immigrants / trading

one home for another / first we leave the womb for air / then the suburbs for the filthy city / in

search of a better life / some of us just happen to leave entire countries. (Kaur, 131). She writes

in a way that reimagines the universal experience of the South Asian community. Over here, her

individualistic and confessional poetry shifts to a general notion and a collective approach. 
In today’s world, people are extra attentive towards female trauma. An exploitation of trauma

and commodification of the feminist struggle can harm the movement deeply, especially in the

east where feminine voices already scream yet aren’t heard. There are Kaur’s fans, however,

who refute this argument to say that at least Kaur is honest in her work and that she has been

open about her personal trauma, and that “being a woman of colour exempts her from

accusations of superficiality” (Giovanni). She is honest, and that’s beyond beautiful - but is

honesty a requirement for literature and for poetry? Does this mean that literature based on

fiction and lies is not literature? Poems are inherently “deliberately created works, not naturally

occurring phenomena” (Watts) and so it is a poet’s responsibility to keep language safe. How can

that be done? Through innovation, creativity, engagement, finding new ways to make language

and literature meaningful through literary devices, honoring the essence of poetry which is

storytelling, and making it memorable in the process.

While her feminist poetry is powerful and easy for others to understand what women go

through - the way she writes her poetry seems lackluster which makes her feminist poems feel

lackluster and empty too. And feminist literature does not deserve to be treated like that - with

appropriation, with the incorporating of the universality of experience, and with commodifying

trauma of ‘other’ people and communities. Poets must tell accurate stories, not stories that are

easy to sell.

           It is truly evident that the amount of criticism on Kaur’s work means she must have

violated something that has called for the collective safeguarding of future poetry. The violated

expectations have mostly been for ruining traditional aesthetic importance in poetry, allowing

poetry to be this easy and assessable, and perhaps beginning a culture of poetry that is lackluster.

Fysedeen says her poetry is “the illusion of profundity, all set on the background of simple type
font and a cute line drawing” (Fysudeen). Her work makes sense, and it appeals to a wide range

of audiences, but the complaints regarding Kaur’s work remain constant - leaving readers and

critics very little or nothing to do with texts, leaving them no meaningful way to interact or

interpret her poetry. Murrin once said in his essay while talking about poetry as literary criticism,

“it is not the first time that someone has managed to conduct a burial service for the arts, all the

while constructing a brilliant work of art” (Murrin, 205). However, Snow talks about what poetry

was always meant to do, “It should restore man's faith in himself and his species. It should

unchain the heavy weight of heavy hours and light new sparks in the ashes of mankind” (Snow,

2).

Conclusively, there is a dire need for intelligent conversation on what comprises

literature, what can be said as poetry, and what the obsession of only calling something poetry

when it is difficult us. Can literature be easy? Why or why not? Why does the contemporary

world need to know? Kaur leaves us with heavy questions worth pondering upon, but it does not

negate the fact that her poetry has simply been an example of what poetry probably shouldn’t be

in the future. Modernism’s ambitions rested on creativity, on breaking free from traditionalist

chains, and while the modernist poets have done exemplary work on that front, the space

between what was then and what is now with Rupi Kaur, has defined how good poetry fell

through the tracks, and how it must now be saved.

Words: 3982
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author.

‌@oliviacraighead. “if you / get bored / just write / some / fake / rupi kaur / poems / it's fun.”

Twitter, 15 June 2017, 8:54 AM,