Poetry is Personal - Rachel

Reading poetry is something that can easily be taken for granted. Throughout our primary education we deal with it. We learn how to read it, how to understand it, how to take it apart and put it back together, and then eventually how to write it. In some cases this turns some of us students off of poetry. We say that forcing us to look at every word and dissect it makes us annoyed with poetry. For me it was always the very opposite, I always thought it was amazing how every word was more than just a word, how when taken apart I found so many more meanings than I had thought were originally there. But I understand the feeling many students get when they say this type of analysis heavy focus on poetry sucks the joy right out of it. Because joy is what poetry is really there for. Yes, it has literary merit and deserves to be studied and understood, but it is primarily meant to be enjoyed. It is there to enrich our senses and make us feel, it is there to connect us for one split second with someone else, to allow us to empathize, to share consciousness with another person, if only for a moment. It is there to play with our feelings, to make us laugh or cry, or to just be in awe of the world. It is there to point out our flaws and our accomplishments, to remind us that there is a world out there beyond what we know. So I understand when some students say, “I never enjoyed poetry, we just analyzed it, I never understood what the teacher was saying.” But poetry is not there to make you feel dumb. Once in an English class for an exam we were told to analyze “Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town” by E. E. Cummings. I loved the poem and wrote this incredibly long detailed analysis for it, partially because I just thought it had so many meanings and was not entirely sure what my teacher wanted. After the test everyone was discussing how easy the analysis was because Cummings’ had just substituted “anyone” and “no one” as names for the two main characters in the poem, something I had completely missed in my long analysis. But does that mean that what I thought about the poem was wrong? Of course not. Because poetry is a personal experience. Whatever we take from a poem is not wrong. Even if the author decides to write about the poem and say, “This is what I meant” and it is entirely against what you thought it meant, are you wrong then? No. When you read the poem, you felt a certain way about it, you were not wrong. How could the way you feel be wrong? That is why I love reading poetry and think it is so important. You take away from it as much as you put in to the poem. No poem is the same for two people; you may have similar ideas, but the way you feel and think about it is a personal experience just for you to cherish.