The poem is a rarified object in the study of early modern women’s writing, often assuming preeminence in long histories of textual and critical recuperation. This encyclopedia encompasses myriad textual forms, but women who write poetry make a set of formal, conceptual, moral, and aesthetic choices that reflect particular influences, rhetorical and literary abilities, and self-conceptions as a writing subject. This introduction to the poetry entries in this encyclopedia asks what it is that poetry does particularly for women writers and their readers—and how. What are early modern women writers’ investments in poetic cultures and philosophies? What are the particular affordances of poetic forms and genres? And how do women writers’ engagements with these contribute not only to our critical narratives of women’s writing, but to those of early modern poetry as a whole?