I think I like poetry but...

If you've ever followed up the words in this title with "I don't know where to start," I've written this post for you.

Most importantly, you should be reading poetry that speaks to you and, ideally, finding a community with whom you can discuss what you are reading. Certainly a lot of poetry can be enjoyed alone, but hearing other readers' points of views has a way of challenging the way you think and bringing tremendous richness to your reading that is extraordinarily healthy. Defending your own point of view has a way of helping you to clarify your thinking and to examine your unconscious assumptions. Great stuff. I hope a lot of it happens here.

What you should be reading is probably not nearly as important as who you are reading it with. I often advise my students that discussing literature is a little like learning tennis. You want to do it with someone who is more proficient than yourself so that they can bring you along a little at a time.

But if there is one text that I think would make a most suitable introduction to the subject, it is Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. The language and syntax of the poems themselves is not quite so complicated as the Shakespeare inflicted upon us in high school, yet it is challenging enough to bring most readers along "a little at a time." As much as I recommend the poems themselves as a starting point, I think the preface to the second edition to be a valuable way of getting started in literary criticism, which is really just a means of poetic appreciation. In the preface, Wordsworth says a great deal about the role and language of true poetry that still speaks to me 200 years later.