AP English Literature at Notre Dame
"Anyone who feels poetry is an alien or ominous force should consider the style in which human beings think. "How do you think," I ask my students. "Do you think in complete, elaborate sentences? In fully developed paragraphs with careful footnotes? Or in flashes and burst of images, snatches of lines leaping one to the next, descriptive fragments, sensory details?" We think in poetry. But some people pretend poetry is far away.— Naomi Shihab Nye