Poetry Is an Acquired Taste

Poetry is an acquired taste, kind of like roses.

Often, we don’t appreciate certain things until we acquire a little maturity.  That is certainly true of me and poetry. When I was a kid, like brussel sprouts, poetry was foreign to me.  It had a suspicious odor about it, and I instinctively knew that I wanted no part of it.

This week, as I continue teaching a unit on poetry with my freshmen, I’ve been thinking about why I hated poetry so much as a kid.

I’ve narrowed it down to three reasons:

    1.  No one taught me about enjambment.

That’s the term used to define when a poetic thought runs from one line onto another before it ends.

I thought that when you read poetry, you had to stop at the end of each line.  After all, it often rhymed there, and that was the way the teachers frequently read it to us.  

No wonder I couldn’t make sense of what the poet was trying to say.

    
 2.    It didn’t make sense to me. 

a.       See number one. 

b.     No one taught me about rhythm or scansion.  Knowing the concept that lines had specific numbers of syllables with specific stress patterns might have helped me understand why some words were used in place of others.  That knowledge would also have helped me smile, rather than scowl perplexedly at syntactical shifts.  Now, I like to imagine myself as a kid scoffing at a line, knowing its bewildering word order was simply created to form a spondee instead of an iamb.  I would have held the power, not the poem.

     3.     I didn’t read the footnotes. Were there even footnotes in our literature textbooks back then?  If I had, I might have understood how a teacher could infer so much about the true meaning of a poem, while I had no clue about the meaning of an archaic word or an allusion, much less the entire jumble of words called a poem. 

This week in class as we read more poetry and continue to write our own poems, you can bet we will be talking about enjambment, rhythm, and archaic words and allusions.  Maybe my students will come away being more appreciative of the beauty and inspiration poetry can offer than I was at fourteen.  Maybe they will even compose a little poetry for their dear ones this week in honor of Valentine’s Day.

As for me, I am still working on appreciating the roses.

How about you?  What's your adult take on poetry?