Potentiality gives poetry a vocabulary for futures that remain open, withheld, or unrealized. A seed, unfinished sentence, dormant desire, or promised departure can embody what is not yet actual without being mere absence. The concept also includes the power not to act, preserving refusal as a genuine possibility. Poems attentive to potentiality often use conditional tense, suspended syntax, and images of thresholds to keep becoming active within the present.

Potentiality names what a person, practice, or thing can become or do, including possibilities that have not yet been realized. Aristotle distinguishes potentiality from actuality, while later thinkers use the term to question fixed identities and predetermined outcomes. In poetry, an unfinished image, conditional statement, or open ending may preserve potentiality. The concept is useful for discussing agency, transformation, futurity, and unrealized alternatives.