1. Poetry feels terrifying because we feel stupid if we don't get it.
2. This wasn’t always so, for most of history, poetry was enjoyed by the masses.
3. With science/reason asserting itself in the 19th century, poets glorified poetry's meaning.
4. It became abstract, academic, pretentious, rejecting rhyme, harmony, form, meter and more.
5. By putting cleverness and detachment over joy and beauty, its ability to connect diminished.
6. To complement, poetry was being too well-taught, as difficult texts to be analysed, not enjoyed.
7. Such that we were required to spend more time understanding poetry, rather than appreciate it.
8. The poet Archibald MacLeish suggests that poetry should not mean, but be; felt, not fathomed.
9. Or as the writer Verlyn Klinkeborg suggests, meaning need not be the sole purpose of poetry.
10. That the purpose of each line in a poem can be the line itself, and pleasure derived for what it is.
11. Which is how children enjoy poetry, reading each line repetitively, and with incredible exactitude.
12. Each line in the poem itself has rhythm; it uses alliteration, hyperbole, metaphor, simile and so on.
13. Klinkenborg notes that children demand the line itself, whose meaning isn't a substitute for the line.
14. Reading poetry this way helps one pause, take notice, rather than obsess only on extracting meaning.
15. Henry David Thoreau observed that each of us are primed to receive only what we're ready to receive.
16. And to truly receive, or see anew, a special type of receptivity, unblinded by preconceptions, is needed.
17. Poetry provides that; it opens us up like no other form of writing, and lets us see more than we can see.