How to Read (and Even Enjoy) Poetry 

This video is an introduction to a productive mindset for reading poetry. If you're looking for some more practical reading skills (and more difficult poetry), check out this video for the next steps: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-jv6OA3QBRLM.html

"Life isn't a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced" -Soren Kierkegaard

I suddenly feel the urge to write a poem about how I feel like I’ve been missing out on poetry

"Painting is poetry that's seen rather than felt and poetry is painting that's felt rather than seen." ~Leonardo Da Vinci

In high school, I remember wanting so badly to grasp Shakespeare better. And the more I stopped trying to make sense of each word and just let the whole of it paint a picture in my mind, the more I understood what was happening. It’s so counterintuitive-to just let language wash over you and trust yourself to understand on another level. It’s like trying to hold a bubble, which ruins it. You can only watch it shimmer in the air until it’s gone.

My poetry professor in university would say that poems give you feelings where words fall short. A shared experience is the perfect way to describe it

I have a Bachelors of Arts in Creative Writing, took poetry classes, and not once was the genre of poetry been clearly articulated. Always technique, never the purpose. It was always presupposed. I appreciate how clearly you intro-ed this and makes me want to re-export them genre more

78 years old and I have just learned tor the 1st time that poetry and literature are not impossible test questions to labor over until you finally have enough days into English class to move onto the next grade. Thank you for introducing me to a whole new world of enjoyment!!

Art is a mirror. It teaches you who you are.

This is the best explanation of poetry I have come across up till now. I have been really struggling with understanding what the poet meant but your perspective takes the pressure of “analysing” off. Thanks!

You just openened up a whole new world for me, thank you so much! I always thought that poetry is "just too difficult for me" and couldn't enjoy it because I thought I would just always miss "the actual meaning". You stopped the poetry gatekeeping for me🥺

Thank you for this video, it’s really alleviates the anxiety of “getting a poem right.” And, fittingly, the first poem in the Library of Congress poetry collection that you linked is “Introduction to Poetry,” by poet laureate Billy Collins; “I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.”

So glad RU-vid randomly recommended this to me. You are an excellent communicator and I particularly love that photograph analogy for poetry. Off to go read some poems now!

As a teen I always appreciated poetry but I never got it, I never understood “why”. You have rekindled a lost joy for poetry that & thank you for that!😁

This is, by far, the best redemptive explanation on reading poetry i have come across the internet. We always discuss it like this during literary workshops. It is great that it is expressed here too, as it helps many appreciate poetry more.

As a poet I agree. Writing a poem is one of the great pleasures of life. Imagine how Frost felt when he wrote Birches. He must have felt great.

I learned more in 11 minutes than years of language arts classes in high school and college. I think this will help me to not only enjoy poetry more, but also movies, music, and visual arts. Thank you,

I used this to help introduce my grade 11 class to our unit on poetry in which we are reading the poems of Wallace Stevens. They found it very helpful - especially because they'd (unfortunately) been taught to do the exact opposite of the points you make here. Thanks!

I'm autistic and as a child 19th century french poetry was my special interest. I could spend hours reading and memorising poems because I loved the ambiance it created around me. It felt like with a few words the poets could give me emotions to feel and landscapes to contemplate and experiences to ponder. Suffice to say I didn't have me many people to share my love of poetry with. I'm so happy to see more people getting into reading and writing poetry! It's a fun outlet for creativity and there's something so special about keeping a few verses with you that describe a special day, a nice holiday, a beautiful sunset.

Spot on! It's truly unfortunate that the way poetry is generally introduced to kids in school typically involves a painfully tedious exercise in meticulously "decoding" the puzzling symbolism employed and then formulating a conclusion about what it "really means" according to a particular method of analysis or some interpretation deemed to be "correct." If there was ever a way to rob poetry of its myriad enchantments, then methodically dissecting it in such a sterile and formulaic way would be a hard one to beat.

I often feel very alone in my love of poetry. I just really enjoy reading all kinds of poems and the images they create in my head that I could never ever imagine on my own. I don’t know anyone else who enjoys them like I do so I’m very excited to have found your channel!!

I have studied literature up to university level but I have always been trying to decode or unravel the meaning of poems, especially shorter ones, which has often been a frustrating experience and meant that poetry has been my least favourite type of literature. I wish someone had told me this years ago. Hopefully this will give me a new way of reading and appreciating poetry. Thank you Andrew.

The photograph analogy really unlocked a new perspective with such clarity

One of my favorite things in poetry is when that experience is not necessarily shared, but can be generated and developed during the reading itself; it's like showing the reader a whole sky and each reader will see different cloud shapes or constellations. Playing with language can provoke really unique sensations and feelings.

Thank you so much for your take on poetry! While there can definitely be "hidden" meaning in poetry, it's not hidden in the poem, it's hidden within the reader and the poem just brings it to the surface, per my experience. What makes a poem particularly touching is if it stirs up states and emotions you as the reader have experience before, what makes it have "meaning" is when it actually connects the dots between insights you already have, but couldn't put together until you found the key to them, whether in a poem or from anywhere else. So in this sense, what moves me in a poem is when said poem speaks of me and about me, what's moving is the self-reflection and also remembrance of experiences past, or even the making up of experiences I haven't had... I've never been in that scene with red wheelbarrow, yet it has touched me some as you described it! Thanks again :) I stumbled on your video by complete happenstance, but will be looking at others!

i love what you said about poems being like a photograph. It makes me think of narritive poems, and in a way, graphic story telling, like a comic strip (just a sequence of drawings (or even photos) telling a story) when you think of joining the pictures of poems together (with an end result in mind of course) than one could write a poem, a narrtive poem in ways that can connect and project an image into your mind in a swifter and pronounced way. It seems to me new possibilities to tell a story. These are things I search for on a daily basis LOL its possibly comparable to that of a reader like a viewer, enjoying a motion picture. Capturing momnts (that again if you combine with thought around it) can create a story in text that can move for readers in ways that a short story, novel, or even film script, and play can't. This is theory, and one that I am enjoying very much atm.

As a published poet, I think this understanding of poetry can greatly challenge poetry writers to create more visual and external poems. Many poets today (including me) focus more on emotional, thoughtful, or opinionated expression instead of visual “experiences” as you put them. I think that this video compels me and (hopefully) all writers to try and write poems with less of an internal emphasis and more of an external one. As you said, this would ideally also motivate writers to care less about arguments or “profound” psychological pieces and, instead, just write about whatever they want. Wonderful video!

Loved this video, both as a writer and enjoyer of poems. You bringing up that poetry is about the experience more than any message makes me think of a line by R.A.P. Ferreria in his song CYCLES, talking about artists broadly: "Their job is to invent trophies of experience."

Oh my gosh! I feel so much more free to just have “my” experience (whatever that may be) be the “correct” one versus struggling to tease out the what the “right” one is. Also your description of poetry as being a “snapshot” would have been a powerful shift in how I experienced poetry, had I heard that in school. Thank you so much! I’m excited to share this with my partner 🥰

I’m 35 and you’ve given me a newfound appreciation for poetry. I've just read a few that I'd known in the past and it feels wholly different. Thank you so much. I’m about to embark on a journey of experience, a savoring of moments, and I’ll report back sometime later!

Thank you. I am 63 years old and this is the first time I have stopped to understand poetry as a snapshot of someone's experience. I love photography and understand sharing an experience visually but have never connected it this way, so thank you for helping me "visualize" a poet's snapshot-experience via language.

That is the single most accurate discussion of how poetry is open to everyone. Whilst you were explaining the “…glazed wheelbarrow “ I was thinking of the ‘gateway’ poem that did exactly the same for me, Walter de la Mare’s The Listeners” This poem opened up a whole world to me that had been shut away and, as I mistakenly thought, only accessible by the ‘academically trained’. You showed what I had thankfully stumbled upon. Fantastic discussion, thank you

Thank you for giving me permission to just like a poem for the experience and words. I have often been puzzled by the “solving” mentality some people have and thought I might just be missing something.

In highschool, I felt so alienated when we read poetry. Whenever I would tell my classmates, that analysing isn't how it was sopposed to be done, they would just shrug or imply that I'm just not getting it. I'm still not sure why anyone would pretend to enjoy poetry that way, or why we never learned to actually READ poems. I'm lucky to have discovered the joy of writing poetry without any outside influence and thus gain an understanding of how to read it as well. I love your explanation of it being like a photograph. It's like a photograph that gets wider and more vibrant the more you are able to immerse yourself, which makes reading it so rewarding, and writing it encourages you appreciate your surroundings on a deeper level.

This is the best reason I've heard of for giving poetry a second chance ! Thank you so much ! It IS stressful to always try to figure stuff out ! I just want it to wash over me, not having to analyze it like we did in high school.

When I read, “Oranges” by Gary Soto I was immediately in that moment. I understood the humanity in the poem not by breaking down each word but by simply taking it for what it is. A lovely memory to be treasured.

I have always said that if I can make someone feel the same way I felt when I wrote the poem, then I have succeeded as a poet. In that sense the poem is like a bank for emotions, accessible to anyone who can read it.

That is awesome. I had no idea this is what poetry is. I spend a lot of time pondering on particular past experiences. It would be really cool to capture them in poems to read in the future.

Thank you, Andrew. I started writing poetry about a year ago, although I still consider myself a pre-poet. But I just won a poetry competition and I was getting nervous thinking, "do I really even know what poetry IS?" So I appreciated your insights.

“You wouldn’t show the photo to someone who wasn’t there and say ‘now tell me what this means or I won’t think you’re very smart’” this totally just changed my thinking about poetry, thank you!!

This video gave me ptsd flashbacks to teachers asking me what impossibly vague poems meanings were 10/10

Thank you for this. I’ve often been so intimated by poetry that I avoid it and know I’m missing out on a beautiful art form. This helps it seem more approachable indeed.

In my 70-some years, I've slowly come to appreciate poetry, and your explanation articulates my feelings. My favorite poem is Tyger Tyger by William Blake. I love tigers, and if someone were to ask me why, I would show them Blake's poem. It captures the mystery of one of the most beautiful and most dangerous creatures in the world.

Thank you for telling me this; the feeling that I've written a poem comes fully only after a cryptic message is there to crack.

RU-vid algorithm found me a gem, today! I've been out of school for nearly a decade and haven't even thought about poetry since then, but this video gave me new appreciation for it.

Ahh thanks Andrew for this video! I have really been struggling with this primal feeling of "not getting the poet's views" and it is really stopping me from just enjoying the poem! But now I know how to look forward it and now I'm gonna read a lot of them.

Amazing. I’ve always hated poetry because I never understood it. This is liberating. I love poems now!

this video is pretty much what got me into writing and reading poetry. i never have felt more seen with your example in highschool and how it felt like it was a riddle to be solved. school never taught me to appreciate art as it was, there was always a lesson to be taught for some dreaded grade. after this video i found love for it again, and even wrote my narrative referencing this video for school!

This is simply incredible. By nature I am analytical and its difficult for me to relax and go with the flow. For the longest, I could not get into it, even though there have been several circumstances of great stress I created my own as an outlet. You simply telling us its meant to communicate an "experience." is so simple and obvious I feel like a goof. Thank you very much.

I have loved poetry all my life from my maternal grand parents quoting from Burns, down the years. All through school (60years ago) I would be asked, "What did I think of a poem and why did I like it?" I always replied, "Because I disappear when I read it." This was never an acceptable answer. The tutors needed much more re the techniques of construction....A poem is immersive. As you say it is an experience. Best Wishes from Scotland. Jock.

I love this video. I've always loved reading books, but too scared and intimidated to get into poems. This video has opened my eyes to how awesome poems can be!

This seems like a great channel, I'm glad RU-vid recommended it. I've always been struggling with enjoying poetry - I love reading, but any stimulation from poetry has mostly eluded me, with "huh, kinda cool" being my best reaction to it. Since I feel like I'm missing out, here's hoping your videos will remedy that, cheers.

Thank you so much for this enlightening video! Poetry has always felt like this mysterious puzzle to me, but your channel has changed my perspective entirely. Your approach of emphasizing the enjoyment of poetry over decoding it is refreshing and liberating. Keep up the fantastic work in demystifying the world of poetry for all of us!

I've written poetry on/off for over half of my life by now (That makes me feel old...) but still, with my 13-odd something years of experience in writing it, from freeform to limericks, to haikus or odes, I've always felt that none of mine ever "had" to have a deeper meaning. If what I wrote read the way I wanted it to read, I was happy with the result (Or even if it didn't! I loved hearing people's interpretations). It didn't "need" to be analyzed. It could, but it never "needed" to. I like this video a lot! I appreciate that you've made it, because I think poetry has become misunderstood, with current culture and school especially teaching poetry with a certain bias. Sometimes the curtains are blue simply because the curtains are blue.

I've heard many people say poetry needs to be a rhyme and I know poetry does not need to have a rhyming scheme. I also hear people say that poetry needs to have metaphors for it to be poetry. These are reason why many people resist from creating poetry or reading it. You have explained poetry very well and many people get this simplistic concept of reading poetry and rather turns it into structured formats. They miss what a poet is actually trying to create is an enjoyable EXPERIENCE that is not focused on cerebral explanations or schemes of structured writings, it is simply based an experience for the poet and reader to connect with each other. ❤ I hope that poetry will be more popular because it helps with perspective and reflection in thoughts and experiences.

"Poems aren't riddles, but most of them are a joke." -some wise guy

I like what you’re doing, man. This video is so important, especially in today’s overly fast-paced culture of immediacy. People don’t wanna think about anything for longer than a few seconds. We’ve become very literal and want results instantly (at least in the western world). I think folks would also benefit from learning how to appreciate the ambiguity of more “art house” films. Some are even called “tone poems”and for a reason lol.

I cannot thank you enough for this video. You have severely changed and shifted my perspective on poetry as a whole, and deeply resonated with everything said! Before this video, i was a textbook case of, "bad experiences in highschool due to trying to figure it out", reading them as enigmatic and vague puzzles! I never understood, nor was taught, what the point of a poem was, and found them entirely frustrating because I couldnt for the life of me, 'figure any out', reading them for meanings as i did novels and stories. We studied Plath for months and it was a tedious and impenetrable. I think moving forward, i am no longer going to entirely shut poetry out, and attempt see it for what it is! Thank you once again

I don't know how to explain this, but this guy has the perfect look and voice to talk about reading poetry

Wow, this is a very earnest explanation of poetry that I've never thought of before and makes perfect sense. What a great video, thank you!

I'm glad I found this older video. Excellent tips! Thanks for all you do, Andrew.

The Red Wheelbarrow, to me, feels like it’s describing how our perception works, particularly when reading a poem. The small, simple details let you evoke a larger setting, and a network of other images.

One of my favourite songwriters once said that if he wanted to say something very specific with his lyrics, he would write an essay, not a song

I completely agree. I only recently started to like poetry out of self-exploration, I've graduated from university now. I wish you had been my English teacher in high school so I would have appreciated this form of art earlier. 😁

This is the first explanation of poems that actually make sense for me. I will probably not go to deep into poetry but having it as a skill is very helpful (especially in school). I 've been trying to better my writing skills and even though english isnt my mother tounge the videos on your channel seem to be general enough to be not constricted to only one language. Luckily people like you can teach so many of us through the internet. Thanks :)

THANK YOU! I said in another comment here that I'm a poem and I had a concerning amount of people tell me stuff like "I don't usually like poetry, but your stuff is great and easy to understand" or "I love this but I can't understand it" and I'm just sitting here like "but... I just wrote about a cool tree I saw"

I’m so glad that you’ve created this video. It explains so much in such a wonderful way.

Thank for for taking the time to create and upload this. I have been trying to learn (or figure out) how to read poetry all of my adult life, and the lesson here is a huge leap forward I think.

"If this were a photograph what would you be seeing" -- that is pretty much how I view all poetry that I read and write.

When I was younger (around 10-13) and was writing poetry for English class, I remember absolutely loving writing poetry, and always getting commended for everything I wrote. However, growing older, I grew out of love with writing poetry, and found it harder to write poetry that I felt was great. Sure, it was more lexically complex than what I wrote at 10, but it never felt like it had that same impact. I never really understood why until now. I was so caught up in the mire of good grades and subtextual meaning that I never realised why writing poetry was so fun to begin with. It was all about conveying an experience, not about telling a plot, or the overarching metanarrative, it was just the imagery and face value experience. Thank you for reminding me what made writing poetry as a child so fun.

This was utterly unconvincing. Prose can be flowery / metaphoric too and can make you feel things. I've never felt something after reading a poem.

Your channel is a real treasure! So glad i stumbled across it. Loved your explanation in this video ❤️

I love your summation of what a poem is. They also invoke emotions and can transport us to the moment. Edit. Love your well tied bow too.

This is so beautiful and refreshing. So much of my time with poetry has been spent on untangling, and hunting for meaning. Thank you for opening this door.

I sure am glad I found this video. Thank you for the message and the simplicity in it.

People think I’m weird writing poetry. Let them.

Well done making this video, you're helping a lot of people like me who were instantly turned off to poetry by the mundane classroom meandering of careless, tired teachers. To that I say thank you a thousandfold!

My god thank you. When I've written something and someone asks me what it means it's so annoying. I don't know, it's abstract feeling through words. Sometimes there is concrete meaning and sometimes the context in which it is written amplifies the feeling by connecting it to experience, but not always. Just read it. Just read it. Enjoy it. That's it.

Thanks for this, I was too much into the idea of solving the poems, even if I had to research about it, mainly those harder ones like from Plath which made me feel like I was solving an equation. Even though it's fun sometimes seeing it as sort of an enigma, I can see how one would miss out on a lot more of the essence of the poetry. That idea of a poem being like a photograph is exactly the way I thought about haikus (like a timeless sight of nature), now I'll try to extend that to poetry in general.

Fantastic summary -- thank you --

Excellent video, and the clarification was awesome. Thanks!

Loved the simplicity and the perspective shift! I've recently begun to enjoy poetry - Keats and Mary Oliver are my go to and you've put into words what I had been feeling for a while - poetry is akin to a photograph. Thank you.

This is just to say, thank you.

Amazing!! I've always found poetry repulsive since the only contact I had with it early on was in school, but i've stumbled upon it with new eyes when trying to compose music and this video helps me appreciate poetry in strictly written form. Thanks!!

This was such a helpful video. Thank you for explaining everything in a way so easy to understand. Both reading and writing poetry seem less daunting now. Thank you so much! Great video!

Beautifully stated. Thank you.

There are people who don't like poems? Do they not know what lyrics are?

Love the video! I'm trying to learn how to write lyrics and its pretty tough, this has been very helpful. Also, I would love to hear you narrate a nature documentary.

I'm essentially of the belief that schooling ruins almost everything that people might otherwise develop a passion for. The classes I did worst in school are today rediscovered interests. Thanks for this video. I appreciated it. It may have sparked an interest in poetry for me.

So, poetry is art. I was always good at writing poems in school. Once a teacher even commented one of my poems Inwrote after a breakup as "Brilliant!", which is one of my favorite memories from school, which was otherwise a rather uncomfortable experience for me as a kid with inattentive ADHD. I never liked interpretation of poems much, but I know that they always made me feel things. I especially enjoyed poems by people, who wrote about thimgs they really enjoyed. The way Omar Hayam wrote about women and wine, as mundane as it may seem, was so appreciative, soulful snd full of joy to be alive. I really have to give those a reread. I haven't read poems, aside of unintentional Reddit haikus, in years. Thanks for reminding me of a nice thing. 😌

As the others have commented, this has been extremely helpful. ❤

This did gave me a new perspective towards poems. Now I won't look at it as I used to look at it before. Thanks a lot for igniting my interest in literature. Btw just a suggestion, there are many classic poems (by Shakespeare, Aldous Huxley etc) which are actually difficult to decode. It would be nice if you start making videos explaining them as you explain really well in simple words

IDK how the algorithms got me here but loved this! What you tried NOT to do and ease folks into reading (and perhaps even writing poetry 😮) is exactly what the English classes do in any country and take the fun out of it! When you introduced the red wheelbarrow I paused the video there even before you said anything and my mind just created an image (as it does with any written piece), perhaps a bit more zoomed in than your’s. It was dwelling a little too much on the red and the glaze of rainwater, clinging droplets and I can understand that due to my obsession with light, water, related imagery and photography. But after all that, my mind wandered a bit into all the work the person put in their farm / garden and having a quiet time… meditative, perhaps in the soft light of dawn or dusk after a short spell of rain, fresh and fragrant earth! I know how much I used my wheelbarrow… one that was way past its glistening days and perhaps was just happy to be still useful! I think the literature folks get fixated a bit too much on the latter. When I was in school I used to wonder how could they say those things about the poem so definitively?! Did the poet make any secret confessions somewhere or annotate elsewhere? Even if they go that route a bit, perhaps they could lead this way… “here’s what I think could’ve been, what do you think?” Perhaps it’s daydreaming into the poet’s day or night, being let in by its imagery.

Thank you for sharing much appereciated!

I like the photo analogy...for me, I liken the poet to a painter, vs photographer...the words are the paint and brush and the poem is the finished painted cavass. Some poems can be surreal and deep and cleverly subtle or abrupt and blunt...impressionistic or graphic art likened to The Raven and Gangsta's Paradise...my personal favorite poem is The Coliseum by Edgar Allan Poe! When reading it, keep in mind that there are like 18 exclamation points (!!!!!! !!!!!! !!!!!!) This is an eclamatory expose of such a profound triumph of human will!

Before, I also thought poems were riddles. But then, when I discovered japanese haïkus and Ogdnen Nash in my early 20s, I finally understood how to enjoy poems, how short as they may be.

I'm a poet. The poems come from a balance in the soul. A balance between experience and spirit. Poems are a gift. I really appreciate your take on poetry.

oh my goodness. i spent years avoiding poetry - i never could "understand" it, so i gave up on ir completely. then i saw this video, thought "huh, why not?", and here i am, almost tearing up at how simple it is. how easy and pleasant and thrilling it may be to share a few moments with an author, to see the world through their eyes. i don't have to "understand" anything more than humanity at its finest, which is the joy to create and then share with other people what we've done. thank you from the bottom of my heart for this video. i'm definitely staying here for more! and i'm so excited to read some poetry now ❤

I'm 60 years old not one time ever has anyone mentioned how to read poetry. Until now. Thanks

I have a theory that children haven't had enough experiences in life to truly appreciate poetry (especially as their first experience with it is usually in a classroom). That being said, I remember writing a poem when i was a child that i was really proud of. I believe that my experience of studying it later in High School ruined it for me. I am grateful that I found your video because I have recently been wanting to try poetry again. Your video really helped me 'get it' and I feel less intimidated now about going down this path.