Poetry is a special way of using words, making us think about life, the world we live in, ourselves and other people. We reach for poems to express or refl ect all the emotions that we feel but maybe cannot understand. The US poet, Adrienne Rich, said:
Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
Though poetry might sometimes seem complicated, poets want to connect with us, to explain to us how they feel, and to maybe refl ect back at us our own feelings and experiences. The Irish poet, Eavan Boland, said:
Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.
We might not always have the language to express our emotions. Poems give us this language. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said:
Poetry is the best words in the best order.
In important moments – in wedding speeches, the inauguration of a president, the crowning of a monarch – people use poetry to express great emotion. Poets express things better than we often can.
