“I never got poetry,” someone says to me again. And I sigh. Because I never got it either — at least, not until I learned to stop worrying about “getting it.” In fact, “get” — with its connotation of ...

In 1968, Margaret Ackerman of the University of Arizona authored a paper for The English Journal in which she included a summary of what poetry meant to most of her students: “sentimentality, ...