If this is your first time reading poetry, you might find it challenging as it is a more difficult form of writing than the ones that you know commonly. Well, the thing is that reading poetry can become easier once you start to understand the potential goals of poems.
Once you understand what poetry is, you will have an easier time reading about it. One of the best ways to understand poetry is by understanding what poetry isn’t.
Poetry isn’t A Riddle
You should know that poems aren’t puzzles that you must solve. For instance, have a look at this love poetry and think about how it makes you feel. When reading poetry, you start to get a different perspective on life and its countless subjects, including love, hate, death, friendship, etc. Poetry can be interpreted in many ways, but poems aren’t puzzles, as puzzles have meanings that are hidden behind puns, metaphors, etc.
Of course, poets are prone to use metaphors and other devices in their poems –but they do so to make their poems more transparent for the readers to understand and not the other way around. You need to solve a riddle, but you don’t need to solve a poem.
Poetry isn’t A Short Story
Also, you should know that poetry doesn’t compare to short stories, as stories rely on plots, the sequences of events, and the ways that the characters within the story respond to each other or the situations that they are in.
Now, if you read poetry, you will see that poets are the least bothered about world-building and character arcs. Stories need plots, but poems don’t. Also, poems are nowhere to be compared to essays, as essays are essentially about turning over ideas and depicting thought processes through words.
The Main Objectives of Poetry
In essence, poetry has two main objectives. Firstly, poetry tends to capture life experiences and reflect on specific moments. If you read a good poem, you will feel as if you are invited to walk into the shoes of the poet and relive their experience for just a moment.
The other main objective of poetry is the beautiful and powerful use of language. If you read poems, you can see how poets can play with words and language in a way that other types of writing typically cannot. A poem depicts sounds, words, and rhythms to evoke meaningful experiences that are pleasant for the readers and listeners.
Now that you know how poetry is different from other forms of writing, it is time to move on to all the good reasons to read more poetry.
Best Reasons to Red Poetry Every Day
Before we jump to the list of reasons why you should read poetry every day, you should know that poetry can be your safe space where you can connect with the world of poetry and yourself at the same time. Through poetry, you might as well learn the power of words and how you can leverage a few words to express an entire world within.
Straight from the Heart
Typically, there are two types of people in the world: those who love poems and those who don’t. If we look at our ancestors, we see that Aristotle held an elevated view of poetry, stating that it is an art that copies man’s actions. On the other hand, Plato had a negative opinion about poetry, calling it the source of all lies.
On that note, we see that poetry has been with us from the very beginning, which is why it comes from the heart and is written on the heart. Poetry is within you and outside of you – it is wherever you go and wherever you don’t go.
Poetry has allowed people to preserve history and pass down important stories from one generation to another. So, you might ask yourself the important question of whether or not poetry still matters in the modern digital age, and the answer to this is that it absolutely does matter.
When you sit down to read poetry, you do so much more than reading the words that are printed on the page. You learn to read between the lines and decipher the meanings that were left for you to decipher. You learn to delve into the deeper realms of written and spoken expressions, which helps you develop a useful skill of today, which is emotional intelligence. Reading poetry can help you understand human emotions better, which is one of the basic skills needed to live a better and successful life.
Encourages to Think Out of the Box
Poets are creative beings who think out of the box when they write poems for us to read. On that note, poetry has a profound impact on one’s memory. You might have experienced this aspect yourself, such that when you read poetry, you have an easier time memorizing the words, sequence, and rhythms than when you read other written forms.
Also, poetry encourages readers to think outside the box and break their normal thought patterns. The reason why this happens is because while reading poetry, you make connections between the written words, the sounds, the sequence, the meanings, and the emotions that the poem conveys.
It wouldn’t be wrong to state that poetry is a workout for the brain. The more you expose yourself to different poems, the more the written words force you to think differently while actively trying to make connections between the words and their meanings – Not to mention the fact that you might have to read a poem more than once to capture its essence.
The Takeaway
As we move through a fast-paced and busy world, the interesting thing that poetry does to us is that it forces us to pause and reflect on life from a variety of different angles. When reading poetry, we get out of the mode of doing this and doing that and instead concentrate on the mode of being and existing in harmony with the poem. Good poetry can take us out of our comfort zone and make us look at a situation from all sorts of perspectives, which is something that no other written form can do.