Why you should never give up on poetry, from an ex-poetry hater.

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In this day and age, poetry is like marmite. You either love it or you hate it. Until last year, I used to think poetry was for the sappy and self-important. I just didn’t know what all the fuss was for, let alone its relevance and value in understanding the world around me. As an incoming first year English student, this was the ‘verse-case’ scenario: I hated poetry.

The act of being forced to confront poetry and my resistance to it - via my course - (where otherwise I would have disregarded poetry for the rest of my life), led me to realise I had misunderstood both physical poems and the concept of poetry my whole life.

But you shouldn’t have to do an English degree to be able to appreciate and read poetry. In this article I will demonstrate why you should never give up on poetry and some simple tips to help you understand poems better. The irony of this is that reading poetry is a very personal thing. How I interpret a poem may be very different to how you interpret the same poem, (Roland Barthes would call this Death of the Author for any avid theorists.) Yet this is the beauty of reading a poem – it becomes something connected to you and something you can connect to.

With that said, here are some reasons (practical, emotional, worldly… the list goes on) why you should never give up on poetry PLUS some poem recommendations where they fit the bill:

1) Poetry is a very real and effective way of rebelling and communicating a message. One powerful instance of this is M NourbeSe Philips’ poetry, like ‘Discourse on the Logic of Language’, where she explores the complex and violent relationship between colonial enslavement and language. The poem’s form reflects this complexity - the poem itself is 4 pages long with text positioned vertically and horizontally, some capitals, some italics. Parts called the ‘edicts’ (the voice of a plantation owner) sit along-side phrases loaded with meaning and emotion such as ‘English is a foreign anguish’.  How else could one articulate this intricate, fractured and language-centred message? Which leads me onto my next point…

2) Poetry articulates what normal prose and speech cannot. Poetry has this unique and magical way of transcending our closed system of language to subconsciously conjure feelings and messages by putting words, rhythms and structures together in different ways. Take the feeling of ‘yearning’ – it is so hard to put into words, yet poetry has been communicating it since the Ancient Greek times. Have your ever felt that ‘Aphrodite has crushed [you] with desire’? If so, see the fragments of Sappho - the original yearner -  for more. Whatever the time, whatever the language,  poetry finds a way to articulate the inarticulable.

3) In this way, we can use poetry to help better process feelings and emotions, especially complex ones like grief or fear. Nearly all of us can attest to the catharsis felt when listening to a sad song when you’re already sad – the lyrics find a way of meeting us where we are, no matter our situation. Sometimes you might not be able to decipher what it is you’re actually feeling - you may being feeling more than one feeling at once. Poems manage to capture this essence and aid you in sitting in this liminal emotional state. So many of the Romantics like Keats mastered the art of inscribing simultaneous sorrow and joy into poetry - take the well-known classic ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, where the speaker feels a ‘drowsy numbness’. 

4) Poetry can make you feel heard. Whether the poem aligns with your thoughts, values or feelings at a time, this art form can make us feel recognised and validated. A powerful example of this is Maya Angelou’s ‘And Still I Rise’. Yet, sometimes a phrase or line will strike a chord within you, and without realising it, it stays with you forever. For me this is the words ‘unreal city’ from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland’ - I felt this phrase encapsulated my layered feelings toward the city of London.

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5) Poetry comes in so many different and often unexpected forms. Most of us will be familiar with sonnets and iambic pentameter, but there’s so much more. David Miller’s ‘Visual Sonnet’ is streaks of black ink across a page – this is still poetry. Poets have reworked classic forms to create new meanings and exploring why they have done this is fascinating. Bottom line: If you don’t like poetry now, it’s likely you haven’t found a form or poet that works for you. There are millions of poems that exist across time. Chances are you haven’t even read 0.01% of these.

6) Reading poetry teaches us to slow down, be patient and open our minds – a practice everyone could benefit from in our fast-paced, digital-dopamine-chasing world. You might not understand a poem straight away - you might have to read it over a few times and leave it for a while. My poetry lecturer advised us to ‘let the poem you’re reading inhabit your subconscious’ for a few days - in other words, not actively thinking about it or reading it for a few days after your first reading. Ironically, sometimes by not reading the poem for a while, things can begin to click and you can understand it after not looking at it for a while. 

7) Learning the nuts and bolts of poetry (things like meter, rhyme schemes, form, structure, lexical devices etc), is a fulfilling and intellectually stimulating pursuit. It will also gift you with an additional technical understanding of poetry, which in turn makes you appreciate it even more. (Of course, this is not essential to enjoying poetry – as a literature student this is certainly something that I enjoy investing time in, but you can appreciate poetry without going to these depths!)

So please, do not give up on poetry. You may have to open yourself up to feeling frustrated and even vulnerable. Learning to tolerate, understand and then enjoy poetry is an ongoing, non-linear process. The first part of the journey is about letting go of the restrictions and prejudices that have stopped you from fully enjoying poetry before. It might just ‘click’ – and when it does, you have millions of poems available at your fingertips, a new hobby and a new way of thinking and expressing oneself. We live in an increasingly alienating reality of violent conflict, impossible beauty standards, robots that can give therapy… the list goes on. Reading poetry - a distinctively human art-form and creative practice - reminds us of our essential and unifying humanity. 

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Edited by Daria Slikker, Deputy Editor-in-Chief