If you are at all like me, you did not start life with an innate liking for poetry. Although I have always loved to read fiction and non-fiction of various kinds, poetry never drew me in, but instead always left me puzzled and distant. For example, whenever I read one of my then and now favorite novels, "The Lord of the Rings," I always tended to skip the poetic sections as boring and unimportant. I was not alone in this, for a variety of reasons, but I have come to learn the immense value of poetry and wish to encourage you to stop skipping the poems.
One of the primary reasons many of us struggle to read and write poetry is because we perceive poetry to be vague and erudite, complicated and impossible for the average person to understand. We think of poetry as so foreign and serious that it is impossible to understand and we therefore skip it. Poetry today is very rare and struggles to perform well on the market, as the average reader does not seem to care about it. Some poets, while very excellent, are indeed difficult to understand, like T. S. Eliot, so they add to this perception.
Poetry is not identical to prose, certainly, but it is no foreign language, no other world that we cannot understand. There are various tools and elements of poetry, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance and more. But on the deepest level, poetry merely reveals the heart, reveals the deep center of our emotions and thoughts. Poetry is an opportunity to get deeper than the surface level of narration and show true depth of ideas.
I am not, of course, saying that prose is a waste of time or should be rejected. We require a balance between these two fundamental forces of literature, learn to embrace the good in both the events of prose and the ideas of poetry. They serve together to help us enter fictional worlds and grow in our understanding, and we must stop skipping one or the other. Don’t skip the poetry in a novel because it seems foreign and unusual, but learn to embrace it.
Many people reject poetry because we have been taught to read poetry poorly, taught that poems only have vague meaning according to whatever the writer is supposed to be feeling, and we have to search out his feelings and the events that led him to write. This is ridiculous. To understand a story or a poem, we must simply carefully seek to comprehend it through reading it! We must not overthink, but simply embrace what we are given and appreciate the story we are told and emotions we are shared with.
