Why I Resist Poetry

 Ah, poetry, one of my least favorite topics in English class. I'm not sure when I gained this aversion towards poetry, but I know I've always felt pretty apathetic towards it. Recently, we started the poetry unit in English (yay) and we were looking into an article by Maria Popova on resisting poetry on Brain Pickings. It was a pretty interesting article, especially because I can relate to the article a lot, due to my own dislike for poetry. This got me thinking, what exactly do I not like about poetry that averted me from it?
    When I reflected on this topic a bit more, I found that there were many reasons for my opinion of poetry. One of these reasons is the fact that I am a very rational person. Poems are about expressing emotions, almost replicating one's consciousness. I find that it's kind of hard for me to pay attention to things that overly talk about such feelings, as I get bored extremely easily of it. I realized this based off of the article that I mentioned earlier, which states this exact reason to explain why people don't like poetry. Throughout school, I have always felt the need to analyze things from an unbiased and reserved perspective, which is good for subjects such as math or science, but not for poetry. Being self-aware of this idea is pretty helpful, especially for me as it tells me that there can be a connection with emotions and knowledge, which I thought were mutually exclusive before. 

    School also played a huge role in my distaste for poetry. Though I was fine with analyzing the pieces for figurative language and et cetera, I didn't like it when it came to determining the main meaning of poetry. The issue lies when teachers and tests force you to adopt one perspective of the poem as the 'right' answer. We all accept that everyone thinks differently and has different interpretations of the world, so what makes one's interpretation of a poem, which is almost always highly subjective, right? Of course, it's easier to write multiple-choice tests and grade objectively if there is only one right answer, but that ends up being detrimental for students by sucking up all of the enjoyment of poetry, which comes from interpretation a piece of literature with your own unique viewpoint. I'm not sure if I'm being too stubborn with my reasoning, but I am almost positive it was because of this practice that my interest in poetry dwindled. I didn't like how my ideas, even if they were right in my perspective, can be wrong from another's point of view, and I was forced to conform to the general view. Making subjective things objective clearly doesn't work, as it is because of this that poetry loses all of its charms. Poetry needs to be looked at subjectively and not objectively, especially when looking at the poem's meaning as a whole.