Yeah, there are too many people like I used to be who think 95% of it is pure pretension and self-aggrandizement. I was out of HS before I started to really SEE the wealth of enjoyment and edification available there, and began to appreciate the beauty of the SOUND as well as the SENSE of verse. People who've never made the effort are depriving themselves of a great deal, but I also tend to feel you can't really "teach" art appreciation. Different people like different things, and I think poetry is ruined for many students by teachers who supply what THEY enjoy and/or respect however inaccessible it may be to a juvenile mind. People, IMHO, need to find their own way with poetry, but if your sixth grade English teacher ruins it for you that's a lot less likely to happen.

So, yes, it does deserve a much wider readership, though I understand why that's lacking.

Heh, what do you think? I've never been in a bookstore without a poetry section though (I lived a lot of years in a college town though).

Of course.

Many reasons, but I think the biggest is that it's far better suited to conveying things like strong passion, pure beauty and encapsulating the tableau (haiku, anyone...?) Not that prose CAN'T do those things, of course, but it feels a lot more cerebral, at least to me. I've been moved by prose, but I'm more often moved by poetry. Obviously both formats can serve both purposes, but prose usualy strikes me as more analytical and less stirring. It's not a neat divide, anyway; blank verse, free verse and the appreciation all prose authors need for the sound of language, the beauty of words chosen well for both meaning and aesthetics, make pigeonholing everything as poetry OR prose impossible. As it should be.

Perhaps it's trite, but I think I still like Sonnet 18 best. Same theme I once borrowed for someone else: Real love is better than fantasy. Donnes Holy Sonnet 14 is good, too (I like Donne a lot). I read Intimations of Immortality senior year of HS and quite enjoyed it as well. That's just off the top of my head; obviously, per my response to Larry above, The Divine Comedy is a favorite, too. A good example of what I meant before, in fact; I got nothing out of the Inferno when we read it for a college English class, but reading the whole thing on my own, at my own pace, literally changed my life.

Donne, Shakespeare, Marlowe (a man who's probably been plagiarized more than any author in history). I'm not really fond of many poets beyond the Romantic period, because that's when it seems they start to get REALLY full of themselves. That said, Cummings and Frost are nice, too, though much of the appeal of Frost is that he doesn't try too hard, he just writes.

Ironically, mostly through good English teachers.

Well, obviously Donne and Christmas go together like two peas in a pod; he was a Doctor of Divinity, after all. Though his most heavily Christian work is more suited to Easter, but then, Easter is a bigger deal in my mind than Christmas. After that, Marlowes notorious debauchery and impiety (for which he was once tried) might be a nice antidote for you. However, my poetry appreciation began recently enough that I can't really give you any obscure hidden nuggets of authorship; virtually anyone I name you'll have heard of and probably already read, at least in part.