Here’s a fellow lover of poetry:
WHEN I speak of poetry, I think of classic poems written by great poets of the past, poetry that modern educationalists think of as ‘elitist’ literature. Such writing may now be largely the preserve of private schools – those privileged places disliked by our Labour government. This is a tragedy. Great poetry should not be the preserve of the few but the birthright of all children. For poetry is the language of the soul (think of the Psalms) and we all have souls. This is a challenging statement for an age of spiritual mediocrity, the age in which we live now, but it matters urgently – if only to remind people that the language of beauty still exists and that if children are exposed to it through the words, the cadences, the rhythms and the imagery of traditional poems they will have a glimpse of the eternal which they will never forget.
Poetry always mattered to me, but I cannot tell you why. It was simply on my wavelength. Even as a child, I felt it speak in a way prose did not and different even from music, which was also wonderful. I started to write poetry in earnest when I was in third grade, and although I stopped for long periods of time I never really stopped. There were also the poems I was assigned to memorize, back in the day when memorizing traditional poetry (some of it quite bad, by the way) was standard in the NYC school system.
I didn’t realize it, but my mother had also been a child poet although she had quit writing poetry in adulthood and confined herself to clever song parodies. Her father wrote advertising jingles for a living.
My father seemed to have no poetry in him, but he once told me that when his own father died at fifty-nine, when they emptied out his pockets they contained some poems. And my older brother was a poetry admirer who sometimes shared poems he studied in school and admired, and so I was exposed to a very wide variety of poetry and thought that was normal.
I was an adult of about thirty before I realized that not everyone loved poetry. In fact, I was shocked to learn that a great many people – perhaps even the majority – didn’t care for it. So there’s something else, some unknown factor, that accounts for love of poetry. I can’t begin to explain it, although it has something to do with a deep appreciation of a fusion of ideas and emotion expressed with an economy of colorful and unexpected – and often beautiful – language.
In other words, many poems make me shiver, either with delight or with wonder or with awe or with dread or with some combination of all of them. And writing a poem – especially a sonnet, a form of which I’m very fond – is a source of tremendous satisfaction.
Can appreciation of poetry be taught, in the way described in that initial quote in this post? I don’t know, although I tend to doubt it and to think that a person either loves poetry or doesn’t, although I agree that all children should be exposed to it. Maybe you can share your experiences along those lines in the comments.
NOTE: Here’s an early post of mine on memorizing poetry. And here’s one on sonnets.