alt Hacker NewsI never got the point of poetry, even after giving it an honest shot many times. It felt far too compressed to express any thing. I could not separate it from how I would appreciate music. Maybe its because I don't start from the same base as others.
You are right, maybe some humanities classes would've helped or I'm just wired this way.
It's pretty similar to music, yeah. Or perhaps music can be similar to poetry. Just this morning I was re-reading the lyrics for "Pale Green Things" & "Woke Up New" by The Mountain Goats. There's a sort of specificity in intention that the form tends to end up dictating, that can really carry a rich emotional context or metaphor more directly into the listener's brain.
(Of course, prose is sort of like a superset of poetry - it's not a hard dividing line. You may find especially poetic lines in your favorite longform works, especially in good fiction books.)
I do think that many English teachers do a poor job of encouraging a love, or even understanding, of poetry. One of my highschool teachers was in love almost with categorizing the forms of poetry - sonnets and sestets and villanelles, and seemed to think that if we learned the rules about what lines had to rhyme or which syllables to stress, we'd enjoy poetry. I hated it! But then the next year, even against this backdrop of learned avoidance, my teacher was so in love with the ability of poetry to communicate - the unfolding of a few words into meaning like a flower in bloom - something clicked. He focused almost not at all on the structure of poetry, but rather on finding works that spoke to you. I'm still not a lover of poetry, even now, but I have poems I appreciate.