poetry

Poetry is a basic means of communication between people. At school we are used to learning prose first and poetry long after. This is contrary to the experience of human communities in general. Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing ourselves with words. Most primitive communities have poetry but only well-developed nations produce good prose. Young children rhymes and nursery rhymes come before structured stories.
So in studying poetry, we are not studying anything odd and irrational. We are only following in the tradition of our primitive ancestors. We are studying first things first, poetry before prose. Maybe one of the defects of our over-rational education is that it reduces or eliminates our childlike enjoyment of poetry. Training in communication is not confined to poetry. It is also present in other kinds of literature. And training in communication is as important as the acquisition of factual information or of manual skills. It is useless for us to acquire facts unless we know how to communicate these facts to others.
We are trained to express ourselves through speech and writing. We are also trained to understand others when they speak and write, because real communication is two-way. The understanding of messages sent out by others is as important for communication as the expressing of our own messages.
The training takes place mainly in the language subjects-mainly but exclusively, for a certain amount of communication is given to this training. In the language subjects the training is directed in general to the thought-content of messages, e.g. to statements of fact or to questions requiring factual answers. The tress in our language training is on clarity and objectivity.