Poetry Discussion Questions

“Poetry”: How does the language of the poem make Moore more relatable to the audience?
A lot of poems are composed of long difficult words that are hard to pronounce and hard to understand. However, in “Poetry”, Moore took a different route to explaining to the reader what poetry is. That is, she approached the poem with words that are used everyday, a technique to help the reader to understand the true meaning of poetry. I also feel like these lines, “[…] that we do not admire what we cannot understand” (lines 9-11), point out that the average person does not understand deep, complex literary meanings of words that are not used in everyday life. I also feel like Moore is expressing that this is one of the reasons why people do not read as much poetry, since they are indirectly discriminated due to the language filter. To add on, this may be the reason why the author started off with the lines, “I, too, dislike it, there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle” (line 1). Once again, she relates to the audience in preference of literature. Perhaps through the poem, she is attempting to show herself grow out of the phase of dislike and into the phase of loving poetry to the extent of becoming a poet. The ignorance to poetry makes us believe that we do not enjoy poetry, but I feel like the author expresses that it is a matter of opening the book and surpassing the fear of feeling unintelligible due to the language in sophisticated poems.