Merry Christmas!

This will be relatively short and concise but I can explain further if you'd like me to; drop a line via a comment. You are getting my subjective perspective on poetry relating to a religious topic. I am a student. You have been warned.

Poetry is the underwear of the soul (ahem). HA HA HA! Sorry, I thought it was funny but I know it bugs people when I quote things--even funny things--at them when I try to explain a concept.

You can put a book into thirty lines of a poem because writing poetry is condensing meaning-- the kind we usually state plainly in paragraphs or straight-forward sentences or bullet points. Kind of like espresso is a stronger version of coffee (God bless it, every bean).

People don't like to read poetry, generally speaking, and I think there is a good reason for that: there is a lot of bad poetry out there. No--but seriously, whether a poem is "good" or "bad" is more often than not a very subjective judgment. Those of you who do read poetry have vastly differing opinions on the subject.

Not everybody celebrates Christmas, either, so I will try to give a little information from different historical perspectives as I discuss the works.

The poems I'm going to go through are from an anthology of Christmas Poems, which lists the poetry by subject. I'm going to follow that example but I don't want to be limited to it, so I'll just let you know when I change sources or find a different poem I want to discuss.

Also: if anybody wants to take off on a particular favourite and have it posted here, email me at christmaspoems@mac.com and I'll post it for you!