Soul, Heart, Forever: Abstract Words Poetry Can't Carry
A contest judge counted the abstract words that appear most in submissions, explains why they fail, and shares a five step swap drill plus the rare cases where abstraction earns its keep.
One judging month, out of curiosity that turned into mild horror, I kept a tally sheet beside my scoring notes. In 214 submissions, the word "soul" appeared 61 times. "Heart" beat it easily at 89. "Forever" came in at 47, "pain" at 52, and "darkness" at 38. These are the abstract words poetry beginners reach for first, and they are also, with brutal consistency, the words that mark a poem for the middle of the stack. Not because judges are snobs about vocabulary. Because those words do not do what their writers believe they do.
This piece is my case for cutting them, an honest accounting of what they cost you, and a drill for replacing them tonight.
Why Abstractions Feel Powerful and Read Empty
Here is the trap, and it is a genuinely cruel one. When you write "my soul is breaking," the word arrives on your screen already loaded. You supply the breakup, the hospital corridor, the last phone call. The word feels enormous to you because you are pouring your specific life into it as you type.
The reader receives the empty container. "Soul" carries no scene, no smell, no hour of the day. It is a label on a box, and the box arrives with nothing inside. The reader nods politely and feels nothing, then wonders why, since the poem is clearly sincere.
Abstraction is what you felt. Image is how I feel it too.
Concrete images work in the opposite direction. Write "your toothbrush is still in the cup" and the reader builds the whole bathroom, the whole relationship, the whole ending, out of their own material. The image is a machine for producing feeling in a stranger. The abstraction is a receipt proving you felt something once, somewhere, details unavailable.
The Abstract Words Poetry Leans On Hardest
My tally sheet, expanded over several judging cycles, produces a fairly stable top ten. Count your own drafts against it.
- Heart: the single most common word in submissions after articles and pronouns, and almost never doing any work.
- Soul: heart's formal cousin, worn to a smooth blank by two centuries of overuse.
- Forever: a duration no one can picture. Nothing observable lasts forever, so the mind's eye goes dark.
- Pain: names the category and skips the experience. Whose pain, where in the body, at what time of night?
- Love: the subject of half of all poems and a word that should almost never appear in one. The strongest work filed under our love theme proves the point: the word barely appears in it.
- Beauty: an evaluation, not an observation. It tells me your verdict and hides your evidence.
- Darkness: once a metaphor, now a default setting.
- Dreams: doubly vague, since it means both ambitions and the things sleep does, and usually neither is shown.
- Emptiness: describes an absence by naming it, when absence is precisely the thing images render best.
- Time: the great abstraction. Clocks, receding hairlines, and expired coupons exist. Time, on the page, does not.
To be clear about the rule: these words are not forbidden. They are expensive. Each one spends reader trust, and most poems cannot cover the bill more than once.
A Before and After Edit
Here is a stanza I wrote in the house style of my tally sheet, a fair composite of hundreds of sincere entries:
My soul is drowning in an endless pain,
my heart will love you till forever ends,
and darkness fills the emptiness again.
Six of the top ten in three lines. Now the same grief, rebuilt from objects:
You left your toothbrush. Blue, bristles bent
the way you crushed them, brushing too hard.
I have not thrown it out. Every night
I brush my teeth beside it, like company.
Notice what the rewrite gains that no abstraction could buy. Character: the person who brushed too hard is suddenly alive and particular. Time: "every night" gives us duration we can actually feel, which is what "forever" was reaching for. And the emotional temperature rose while the emotional vocabulary disappeared entirely. Not one feeling is named. All of them arrive. This is the whole craft of the image in miniature, and if the mechanism interests you, the glossary entry on imagery goes deeper into why the mind trusts objects over labels.
The Swap Drill: Five Steps to Run Tonight
This is the repair procedure I give poets whose language scores lag behind their emotion scores. It takes one evening per poem.
- Circle every abstraction. Use the top ten list, then add your personal repeat offenders. Be merciless; circling costs nothing.
- For each circle, ask: what did I actually see? Not what you felt. What you saw, heard, touched, or smelled in the hour the feeling happened. Write it in the margin, in plain prose.
- Swap the abstraction for the margin note. The line will get longer and clumsier. Good. Clumsy and alive beats smooth and dead, and you will polish later.
- Reread and delete every feeling-word the new image made redundant. If the toothbrush is doing its job, "lonely" next to it is an insult to the reader.
- Allow yourself one survivor. A single earned abstraction, placed where the images have already built its meaning, can land with real force. One. Choose it like a last match.
When Abstraction Earns Its Place
Now the honest complication, because good rules deserve their exceptions argued properly. The best poets do use these words, and use them devastatingly. Emily Dickinson opens one of the most loved poems in the language with two abstractions in the first two lines:
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.
Look at what she does, though. "Hope" and "soul" survive because they are instantly strapped to a bird: feathers, perching, singing. The abstraction is the subject, and the image is the argument. She does not trust "hope" to carry feeling on its own; she builds it a body. That is the pattern in nearly every successful use of abstract language, and you can watch Dickinson run it again and again: the abstraction appears, and within a line it has wings, or a wound, or a front door.
So the working rule for your one survivor: an abstract word may stay if the poem gives it a body within two lines, or if twenty lines of concrete imagery have already filled it before it appears. An abstraction at the end of an image-rich poem detonates. The same word in line one just leaks.
What This Costs You in a Contest, in Numbers
A practical note from the scoring table. Our monthly contest returns a five criteria breakdown to every entrant, and the language score is where the top ten words above quietly take their toll: a poem can score high on emotion and theme while "soul" and "forever" drag language a full band down. The pattern I see constantly is a poet with real feeling and borrowed vocabulary, which is the most fixable problem in all of poetry. Run the swap drill on your strongest poem, then enter it in the current round and watch what happens to the language line specifically. That number moves faster than any other when the abstractions go.
A poem I scored two winters ago taught me how fast. First submission from this poet: "my heart" four times, "soul" twice, middle of the stack. Three months later, same poet, a poem about the same breakup built entirely out of a car with a broken heater and two people breathing fog at each other in a parking lot. It placed. Same wound. Different words. The heater did what the heart could not.
Feel Everything. Name Almost Nothing.
I want to end by defending you from a misreading of this whole piece. The problem was never that you feel too much. Poets who reach for "soul" and "forever" are usually the ones feeling most; the vocabulary fails them precisely because the feeling is too large for labels. The fix is not less emotion. It is more evidence.
So keep the feeling at full volume and change only the reporting. Give me the bent bristles, the cold heater, the voicemail kept past its year. Trust that a stranger holding your images will manufacture your emotion inside their own chest, because that transaction, that small impossible transfer, is the entire reason poetry exists. The soul can stay out of it. The toothbrush will testify.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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