They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about

Hear the words of Peter Davison, poet and editor, who spoke with clarity and urgency: “They need to learn poetry. They don’t need to learn about poetry. They don’t need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don’t need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.” In these words he draws a sharp line between knowing about poetry and knowing poetry itself. For Davison understood that poetry is not a subject to be dissected like an insect, pinned down by analysis and commentary. It is a living flame, and to know it one must stand close enough to feel its heat.

The meaning of his insistence is this: to truly learn poetry is to experience it, to recite it, to carry it in the heart until its rhythm pulses through your blood. To learn “about” it—dates, movements, styles, critical theories—is only to walk around its shadow. Poetry must not be approached as a corpse to be examined, but as a song to be sung, a truth to be lived. Davison reminds us that what the soul needs is not explanation, but immersion.

The ancients knew this truth well. The rhapsodes of Greece did not teach “about Homer”; they sang Homer. The Chinese scholars of the Tang dynasty learned not by lectures but by memorizing and reciting the poems of Li Bai and Du Fu until their voices became part of the tradition. In India, the great epics of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana were passed down not as lessons in literary criticism, but as living performances, breathed into the ears of new generations. To learn poetry in those times was to embody it, not to interpret it from a distance.

History offers striking confirmation. Consider the life of Abraham Lincoln. He was not formally trained in poetry, nor did he study it in scholarly fashion. Yet as a young man he memorized great passages from Shakespeare and Burns, carrying them within him. These words shaped his cadence, his rhetoric, and his vision. His speeches, remembered now as poetry in prose, were not born from learning “about poetry” but from having learned poetry itself—its rhythms, its music, its force.

Davison’s words also sound like a protest against a modern tendency: to reduce poetry to interpretation, to place critics above poets, to make classrooms about theories rather than verses. But poetry is not theory; it is experience. It is meant to be spoken aloud, to echo in the chamber of the heart, to transform silence into meaning. One does not “understand” poetry in the way one understands an equation. One enters into it, dwells in it, and allows it to shape the soul.

The lesson for us is clear: if you wish to know poetry, learn it. Commit lines to memory, let their rhythms shape your breath. Read aloud, so that the words become music. Do not fear what you do not “understand,” for poetry often works beneath understanding, striking the emotions, stirring the imagination, awakening hidden truths. To know poetry is not to master it, but to let it master you.

Practical wisdom flows from this. Choose one poem that moves you, and learn it by heart. Repeat it until it sings within you. Teach children not just to analyze poetry, but to feel it, to speak it, to play with its rhythms. When you encounter a poem, resist the urge to explain it immediately; instead, let it live in your silence for a while. In doing so, you will not only know about poetry—you will know poetry itself, as Davison commanded.

Thus, Peter Davison’s words endure as a challenge and a guide: poetry must be lived, not explained. It is not to be dissected but to be breathed, not to be catalogued but to be carried. Let this truth be passed to the generations—that to learn poetry is to drink from the spring of human spirit itself, and to let its waters flow through one’s own life.