Cliché
Quick answer: A cliché is a phrase or image worn smooth by overuse, from broken hearts to time healing. Why clichés weaken poems and how to hunt them out of drafts.
A cliché is a phrase, image or idea that has been used so often it no longer makes a reader feel or see anything: hearts of gold, crying rivers, time healing wounds, love like a rose. The word comes from French printing, where a cliché was a stereotype plate cast to reprint the same text endlessly, which remains the perfect metaphor for language stamped out rather than made.
Clichés matter to poets because poetry's core job is to refresh perception, and a cliché is by definition perception with the freshness used up. Every cliché was once a brilliant invention; the first poet to compare a lover to a rose earned that image, and the next hundred thousand did not. Readers skate over familiar phrases without feeling them, which is fatal in an art form built on feeling.
How to Recognise One
The reliable test is predictability: if a reader can finish your phrase before reading it, the phrase is doing no work. Heart of..., cold as..., deafening.... Clichés also hide at the level of image and plot, not just wording: the caged bird for lost freedom, rain at the funeral, the mirror scene of self-examination, autumn leaves for ageing. Even line behaviour can be cliché, such as ending every sad poem on a fading light. New poets often reach for these because they feel poetic; they feel poetic precisely because ten thousand poems already used them.
Repair Strategies
You rarely fix a cliché by decorating it; you fix it by returning to the actual experience underneath and reporting what is specifically there. Not 'my heart shattered' but whatever truly happened: an invented replacement might be 'I kept setting two mugs out for a week'. Precision defeats familiarity, because your particular details have never appeared in anyone else's poem. Another route is renovation: take the cliché apart and rebuild it consciously, extending or contradicting it, so the reader's recognition becomes part of the effect. A poem can say the heart is not a bottle and mean something by the refusal.
The Hunt in Revision
Cliché-hunting is a standard revision pass. Read your draft and underline every phrase you have met before anywhere, songs and greeting cards included, then rework each one from lived detail. Be strict: contest judges read piles of entries, and stock phrases mark a poem faster than any other flaw. Creativity is one of the five things Writory's judges score, and it is measured exactly here, in the gap between the expected phrase and the one you actually wrote.
What poets can take from this
- Underline any phrase a reader could complete without you; rewrite it from real detail.
- Distrust your first image; it is usually the culture's image, not yours.
- Check images and situations for cliché, not just wording.
- If you must use a cliché, break it open and make the familiarity part of the point.
- Read your draft asking where a bored stranger would skim; that is where the clichés are.
Try it yourself
List five clichés about love or grief, then write a short poem that takes one of them literally and follows the logic to an unexpected place, for example actually weighing a heavy heart at the post office.
Questions
Is it ever acceptable to use a cliché in a poem?
Yes, when the poem knows it is doing so: in dialogue, in irony, or when the cliché is turned over and examined. What fails is the unexamined cliché offered as fresh feeling.
How do I know if my image is a cliché?
Ask whether you have met it in songs, cards or other poems, and whether a reader could predict it from the setup. If yes to either, dig for the specific detail of your own experience that the stock image is standing in for.
Why do clichés feel so natural to write?
Because they are the phrases your memory stores most efficiently; culture has installed them. Fluency reaches them first. Good revision exists partly to catch what fluent drafting reaches for.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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