Poetic & Symbolic Lyrics: What They Are and How to Write Them

What are poetic lyrics?

Poetic lyrics don't tell you what to feel — they show you an image and trust you to get there yourself. Rather than stating a feeling outright ("I miss you"), a poetic or symbolic songwriter reaches for a picture that carries the feeling instead: a burned letter, a tide going out, a light left on in an empty house. The meaning is there, it's just folded into the image rather than spelled out in the line.

This is one of ten lyric classifications we use across our Great Songwriters series to describe how someone writes, separate from genre. It sits apart from confessional writing, which states experience directly, and narrative writing, which moves through a story with characters and events. Poetic and symbolic lyrics work more like a poem on the page — dense, image-led, and built to reward a slower, closer listen.

It's also one of the more searched-for songwriting styles, and one of the least understood: plenty of people want to write in this way without a clear sense of what actually makes a lyric poetic, as opposed to just vague or pretty. Below is how we tell it apart from the other classifications, and a growing list of songwriters we've profiled who write this way.