I find it hard to understand why most people never, literally never, read poetry. The best poetry discloses in a few lines more than whole volumes of other writing begin to do. The best poetry deals with great issues which are crucial in our lives but which we hardly care to think about most of the time. The best poetry suddenly reveals truths which otherwise would have remained hidden or distorted in our confused minds full of superficialities and shadows.
Confirmation of this comes from the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska, the 1996 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. She was Polish, an old lady hardly known to the rest of the world until she won the Nobel. I certainly had never heard of her until then and it made me wonder, not for the first time, how many other great poets I have never read. Since then,