Grammar girl here, April is national poetry month in the United States, so today we're

going to ponder poetic license.

When describing writing, you say people are taking poetic license when they use language

in a way that isn't normal or correct.

I think of it as implying that you're cutting them some slack.

Oh yeah, Bob took some poetic license with the lyrics.

But it's not an inherently positive term, it can also be used negatively.

Wow, Bob really took poetic license with that song.

Poetic license is often granted to, obviously, poets, and many of the references I found seem

to consider it to be a privilege granted to poets, a freedom that polite society allows

poets so they can enlighten us and achieve certain effects or work within the constraints

of certain poetic forms such as rhymes or meter.

For example, the book and introduction to poetry notes that you might see a poet using

an usual word order or use auxiliary verbs such as did or do when we normally wouldn't

as in this line from the ancient mariner.

They all the day did lie.

Poets may put adjectives after nouns as in the line from this poem owed to evening.

Some nymph dim your with mantle blue.

And they may sometimes use odd contractions such as nair for never, in shortened forms

of words such as tween for between.

And poets sometimes even make up words as in Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem Jabberwockie.

So we understand poetic license in poetry, but you've probably also heard it used to

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