Helping Dunning-Kruger’s Learn Poetry

 What’s the deal with poetry?

That is the question on the mind of every high-schooler in their English class. “We’ll never need to use this in real life,” they cry, never realizing they’ve become ignorant to any complex meaning, satire, implications, or effects that can come from artistic literature. These are the people that might come across, if anything, a glimpse of “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost and reflect on their entire lives, lost in the profoundness of an idea that most have already contemplated.

We only get so long to live, so how can you judge what’s worthwhile and what’s a waste without a long-term plan in mind? Is anything really more important than learning how to think and understand, learning how others think and understand, and learning what it means to be human? Perhaps you think the latter is better suited for real-world experiences. This is a fair point, but trivial. Everything we “experience” is done through a filter that is our senses. Remember that you are a flawed construction of biology, that your own consciousness doesn’t exist outside of your vessel, that the creation of thought is done through chemical signals in your insides, and that time is a concept that only exists because you have memories. The difference between these “real-world” experiences and poems is that the former doesn’t require a lot of thought. But poetry is an attempt to create any possible experience, even ones outside of the boundaries of your “real-world” ones. If you have enough self-awareness, you can learn much more efficiently from poetry than you can from the so-called “real-world.”

The artist might describe their art as “a work that sparks emotion, that causes people to think and feel, that can inspire people into any direction.” The poet might describe their poems in the same way. These people are both pretentious. They are the kind of people who you see online trying to be a spokesperson for everyone in their field, or plastering their face everywhere since they care more about their status than their work. People don’t become artists to “change the world” or “change people,” they become artists to create. And if those high-schoolers can’t see those creations as anything more than creations, it’s not the artists or the students’ fault: it's humanity’s, for allowing the human condition to become incomprehensible.

Humanity is outdated. We like doing things the way they’ve always been done, because it’s easier and taking risks is bad for economy. That’s why society is on the decline, unfortunately. But there is no inspirational message or desperate call-to-action at the end of this blog because personally this isn’t very important to me.