Margaret Atwood
Quick answer: Margaret Atwood craft guide: the cool ironic voice, flat declaratives and myth revision of her poetry, and how to use those techniques in your own work.
Long before the novels made her one of the most famous writers alive, Margaret Atwood was a prize-winning poet. Born in Ottawa in 1939, she won Canada's Governor General's Award with her first major collection, The Circle Game, in 1966, and has kept publishing poetry across six decades, most recently Dearly in 2020. Readers who know only her fiction are often startled by the poems: spare, cold-eyed, frequently funny in a way that draws blood.
For a working poet she is a masterclass in temperature control. Atwood writes about love, power and extinction at a deliberate emotional distance, in flat declarative sentences that make the sharp moments cut deeper. If your drafts tend to overheat, studying how she underplays is the corrective.
The poet inside the novelist
Atwood grew up partly in the northern Canadian bush, where her father worked as an entomologist, and the unsentimental wilderness of that childhood runs through her poems: nature as fact, not comfort. Her early books, including The Animals in That Country and The Journals of Susanna Moodie, examined the Canadian landscape and the settler mind with an anthropologist's detachment.
Power Politics, from 1971, turned the same detachment on romantic relationships, treating love as a negotiation between adversaries. Later collections such as Morning in the Burned House, from 1995, added elegy, especially for her father, and Dearly returned to loss, ageing and language itself. The poetic voice stayed recognisably hers throughout: dry, precise, unfooled.
The signature moves
Her techniques are consistent enough to name.
What you can learn from her
Lower your poem's temperature and see what survives. Redraft an emotional poem as a series of plain factual statements, no exclamation, no pleading, and let one image carry the entire charge; this is Atwood's basic engine. Try addressing your poem to its subject as you, and keep the tone of someone stating terms rather than begging.
Then steal her revisionist habit. Take a story your reader already knows and hand the microphone to the character who never speaks in it. Judges reward this kind of angle: creativity, in the sense contest scorers like Writory's mean it, is usually a familiar subject seen from an unfamiliar chair, which is Atwood's speciality.
Where to start reading
Begin with Selected Poems 1965 to 1975 for the classic early work, then Power Politics for the love poems at their most surgical, The Journals of Susanna Moodie for the myth-making, Morning in the Burned House for the elegies, and Dearly for the late voice. Her prose book Negotiating with the Dead is also full of usable thinking about why writers write.
What poets can take from this
- Redraft an emotional poem entirely in flat declarative sentences and let one image do the burning.
- Address a poem to you and write it as a negotiation, not a plea.
- Retell a myth or fairy tale from the point of view of its most silent character.
- Save your pivot for the final two lines, and make it change the meaning of everything above it.
- Cut every adjective that asks the reader to feel something the nouns have not earned.
Try it yourself
Write a love poem in the voice of someone stating the terms of a treaty: clauses, conditions, consequences, with the feeling only visible through what the speaker refuses to concede.
Questions
Is Margaret Atwood a poet or a novelist?
Both. She began as a poet, winning the Governor General's Award for The Circle Game in 1966, and has published poetry throughout her career, including Dearly in 2020, alongside the novels that made her internationally famous.
What is Margaret Atwood's poetry like?
Spare, ironic and precise, with flat declarative sentences, direct address, revised myths and endings that pivot. Common subjects include power in relationships, the Canadian wilderness, extinction and grief.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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