One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

At high school, instead of the weekly essay, I would write a poem, and the teacher accepted that. The impulse was one of laziness, I'm certain. Poems were shorter than essays.

The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.