Download or read book The Value of Poetry written by Eric Falci and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Poems spurn skimming. They entreat our full attention. A distracted age such as ours, then, seems an unpropitious time for poetry. Dense, oblique, relatively lengthy, or difficult poems - and at least one of this quartet of terms fits many of the poems in the modern and contemporary canon - ask to be read closely, carefully, and often without an instrumental or definite end in mind, one point that differentiates poems - and literature more broadly - from other categories of 'difficult' texts, such as legal contracts, philosophical treatises, or scientific papers. Some poems require so many readings and so much study before anything like sense breaks through that even the most dedicated reader may find herself asking, 'is this worth the effort?'"--