Why You Should Read Poetry

I shall make a statement, not like a modern poet
Who'd string together a bunch of random
Sentences, in utterances of pathos, with no reason.
That is not poetry... at least not the good stuff.

No... one time it was said,
"Why not say it directly, and to the point?"
There is a little thing in a person
Who can completely understand...
Enough experience, enough contextual understanding
Any poem can be peered into.
Even Wallace Stevens, saying you couldn't,
I understood every line,
Though his theme of the exact minutia is correct;
There is minutia which cannot be peered into
And the poet's exact thoughts are unknown.
But, universal symbolism and Logos
Allows a common theme to be shared
And readers to see and share, and understand
One another in common language.

It was said, "Comparing a woman to a tulip,
"Another inanimate object,"
But, the woman in a dress looks like a tulip
And common language shows a flower is the most beauitufl
Of all God's precious creation, but woman is superior.
Thus, the living flower, which is not inanimate either,
Is compared to the woman, to draw forth that she is
Most beautiful perfection of all God's creation.

Poetry is about universal language, and symbolism.
It is about shared culture, and heritage.
It is about drawing from the common core of Logos
The things found and shared across all cultures.
A Japanese man who is angry about Tolkien's Orcs
Does not understand the Orcs are Huns
Not Chinese. Rather, he is angry, because for some reason
He places himself among the Orcs
Which are despicable creatures, are they not?
And in that, is another feat of imagination
How the common symbolism is lost
And the ancient languages obscured
By modernist attitudes in the arts
Where they are found lacking in the universal language
To understand that an Orc is evil embodied
And is not a racial Allegory.
As Tolkien said many times, he despised Allegory.

No, things are timeless. The Raping Hun is evil
Thus must be discarded, and their body unceremoniously cast into a pit.
The wicked nation--as is the universal, as war is a universal of mankind
And men blessed with peace, fail to understand it, until it arrives
And they see what it has done to their lands.
Or, like the Poet, they read the Bible in wonder at God's violent laws
And see the horror on troops faces for what they had committed on a battlfield.

So also, love is drenched in the poet's verbiage,
They pry and prod, and try to promote peace and love
Sometimes getting into naughty bits of imagination
To help the reader understand.
Sometimes they are a gadfly, and sometimes they are a monster slayer
Expressing the cold and uncouth nature of the world.

Sometimes they express national sentiments, 
And politics, and sometimes they write from memories.
But, it is moral knowledge which poets convey
And without which, we have no moral compass.
Without the moral compass of Poetry
And the vein of imagination winked at by God
There is no common heritage for all peoples
But rather fractures of Sin upon Sin
Making war, and totalitarian style worship 
Of a monolithic and unnatural abomination.

Do understand, poetry is the sentiment of authors
Through memory, through mimesis, through imagination
Through moral and political and religious and philosophical and psychological and sociological
Lenses, that draw together common symbols
Bringing forth the dusk's dawn,
So men do not stumble in the dark.
For there is no politics in poems... there is only the muse.