I don’t get Poetry.

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English at school was the most boring lesson ever. Being educated in a comprehensive high be an English teacher who had been schooled in the classics was never going to be a success. Here we had a man trying to sneak Shakespeare into the lessons for students who had not really progressed further than Charlie and the Chocolate factory. Whether it was a miracle or the fact that we absorbed his teachings as we slept during double English on a Thursday afternoon, some of it did go in and I have a respect for classic literature. However, no matter how much he tried, I never got poetry.

Even now almost 25 years after leaving school, I can remember all the words to Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” and Shakespeare’s “Sceptre’d Isle”, but I don’t get it. I do not understand the purpose for this style of writing.

I understand that poetry does not have to exist just within a poem. In fact this form of poetry – I understand. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens contains one of the finest pieces of writing and it is poetry. Just before Pip meets the convict “Magwitch” for the first time, we are taken to the moors where Magwitch is fleeing from prison and the search party. His legs are still shackled. Dickens attempts to express this with a form of poetry. To represent the short, stuttering steps of a man running in shackles, he shortens the sentences, to three of four words long. The sentences become short and stuttering, portraying the convict’s escape realistically in words. If you have a copy of this book. Find it. Read it. And marvel at the simplicity and effective use of poetry.

Back to the main point. I do get poems. I don’t know why, maybe it is the whiney 13 year old in me saying “ it does not rhyme” or more likely when I was 19 I had a few English Literature student mates, who would recite poetry in the pub, finish  and look around smug – waiting for applause. I will be honest with you, in the north of England; smugness is usually followed by a slap. I do think some poetry is pretentious, but I tend to share that opinion with the author – a character flaw. I will read it and more than likely won’t understand it, but I will read it.

This is just my opinion, I like to read long narrative detailed descriptions, and I never get that reading poetry.