What’s the point of poetry?

[dropcap]T[/dropcap] he amount of times someone has told me that they “don’t like poetry” is pretty shocking. The common misconception when it comes to verse is that everything is either overly complicated like Chaucer or Milton, or boring like that rubbish we studied for GCSE English. Of course, this isn’t true. Saying “I don’t like poetry” is like saying “I don’t like books” – there are so many different types of poems, in so many different styles and forms, that it’s virtually impossible to group them into a single category. Poetry can vary from Homer’s 600-page classical epic the Iliad to Ezra Pound’s 14-word modernist work “In a Station of the Metro”, so there’s definitely something out there for everyone.

Nowadays, unfortunately, reading and writing poetry for pleasure seems to be a dying art. In those far-off times before the television was invented, people would sit around for hours and read verse to each other to keep themselves occupied, but I’d say that today the majority of people wouldn’t even be able to name two contemporary poets. While novels carry on selling, poetry just isn’t valued in the same way it used to be, and this is a shame really. I’m not saying that reading poetry is better than reading prose; the two forms are so different that I don’t think they can really be compared to one another. However, there are many great things about poetry, and we’d really be missing out if this beautiful art form continued to be forgotten.

The first advantage of reading poetry is that it’s less time consuming – it just doesn’t require the same sort of commitment as starting a novel. There are so many people who don’t read novels because they don’t have the time or the patience to make it all the way through, and this isn’t a problem with poetry because a lot of the time you can read it in just a few minutes. For people with busy lives (like us students, obviously!) flicking through an anthology or doing a Google search is a great way to get a quick literature fix without taking hours out of the day.

Second, it’s free. Search any poet on Google and there’ll be a list with links to their entire works, accessible online for absolutely nothing – there’s no need to be faced with the problem of either forking out a lot of money or waiting weeks until the book you want is finally available in the library. For those of us on tight budgets (i.e. pretty much every student), reading poetry for pleasure is an ideal thing to do to pass the time.

And finally, poetry is not only enjoyed when it is read. Many poets speak their works aloud and post the videos on YouTube – it’s good fun, and absolutely no effort at all, to listen to someone perform something they’ve written themselves, since they know exactly how they want it to be read and can really put life into the words (a personal favourite of mine is Allen Ginsberg reading his Beat poem “Howl”). Going to see live poetry is also a great, cheap social activity, and with the Arts Centre giving discounts to students, there’s really no excuse not to go!