Below are a number of quotes about the value of poetry taken from David Gordon's book, Why Johnny Can't Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers. The last one, which you should definitely take to heart, is actually a quote that Gordon includes from Sven Birkerts in his The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetry. Hopefully, the following will encourage you to become a regular reader of verse.
Reading verse rescues us from the mundaneness of life; it permits us to observe again with wonder, and shocks us out of our cynicism and joylessness.
The poet stops and stares at that which most of us merely glance at; he pauses to notice what is humane, significant, and important.
Verse is a common-grace gift that enables us, through the fog of images and sounds, to again see ourselves and others as bearers of the image of God.
When the poet stares at that which the rest of us merely glance at, he invites us to take a longer look with him. It is precisely this longer look that is necessary to cultivate a sensibility for the significant.
Reading texts (and especially verse) cultivates the sensibility of significance. Verse is comparatively dense; line for line, more is in it than prose, and much of what is there is an eye for what is significant about life.
The harder it is for you to slow down, the more you need to be rescued from the twentieth century; the more you need poetry.
