SOURCE: Jacobsen, Josephine. “Poetry's Slant Vision.” Writer 95, no. 10 (October 1982): 12-15.

In the following essay, Jacobsen outlines her personal views on the art of writing poetry and delineates the challenges and rewards of well-crafted verse.

Poetry is the most honored and least read form of literature. Many intelligent and highly literate readers haven't read a poem since leaving college. The most common complaint is, “I'm just not up to poetry. I honestly don't feel that I understand it.” Usually added: “I wish I did.”

The same person will attribute this impenetrability to the difficulties of modern poetry, saying or implying that if only poets wrote like Tennyson or Wordsworth, the complainer would be an avid reader. But both the speaker and the spoken-to know that this is doubtful, to put it kindly.

Why then does poetry hold, as it does, a place of such respect in the minds of...