Few subjects are as ponderous, or difficult to quantify, that the concept of life. What do we mean by the word “life?” What is there to say about a concept so mundane?

For poets, there is much to say on the subject, making “life poems” one of the more ubiquitous of poetic themes, be it ruminations on life at the moment, life in the past, or life in the future.

Poets are by nature an inward-looking lot, and many have chosen to explicitly detail their own lives in verse. Some have also chosen to write about imagined or former lives. One poet whose reflections on his own life – whether in the present tense or his perceived past lives – made up a large part of the body of his work was famed French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Baudelaire chose to ruminate on life by way of reincarnation in “A Former Life:”

Less fantastic than Baudelaire’s lines, English poet Matthew Arnold’s (1822-1888) poems often explored the lives of those who live anonymously, such as he did in “A Buried Life,” a long poem about the pleasures and troubles of those whose lives are usually not captured in verse, excerpted here:

Of course, some poets find themselves up to the task of answering the age old question “What is life?” Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), a poet who convinced himself of his worthiness to address this task even if he didn’t convince all his peers, examined this question in a poem aptly titled “What is Life?” Choose for yourself whether or not Coleridge answers to satisfaction:

Life may be a concept that is difficult to pin down conceptually, but that has not stopped poets from attempting, throughout the ages.