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A review by talypollywaly
The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner
challenging
informative
medium-paced
3.25
Aside from his language being unnecessarily dense at times: has this guy never spent time around high schoolers?
The majority of people who stopped reading poetry after high school forced only Shakespeare upon them-and had poetry soured for them for many years after that- will give you a very simple reason as to why "people hate poetry."
Lerner writes with the assumption that the people who Hate poetry are people who have spent hours studying it, only to shun it.
Most people don't know shit about poetry, but what they do know is enough to resent it, and the weird elitists like Lerner- who try to expouse its beauty without ever getting down to the level of the masses who resent it- aren't helping to convince them.
You could replace "poetry" with "novels" and those of us who hated Hemingway in high school would still be ignored. Lerner ignoring the entirety of this population just seems to prove Lerner's very narrow-minded point: You can only hate poetry if you love it? Or does he really mean you can only hate poetry if you have an English degree?
The majority of people who stopped reading poetry after high school forced only Shakespeare upon them-and had poetry soured for them for many years after that- will give you a very simple reason as to why "people hate poetry."
Lerner writes with the assumption that the people who Hate poetry are people who have spent hours studying it, only to shun it.
Most people don't know shit about poetry, but what they do know is enough to resent it, and the weird elitists like Lerner- who try to expouse its beauty without ever getting down to the level of the masses who resent it- aren't helping to convince them.
You could replace "poetry" with "novels" and those of us who hated Hemingway in high school would still be ignored. Lerner ignoring the entirety of this population just seems to prove Lerner's very narrow-minded point: You can only hate poetry if you love it? Or does he really mean you can only hate poetry if you have an English degree?