I have a penfriend, sorry, email friend, who made it clear at the very outset that she was a sworn enemy of poetry. “I hate poetry” were her words.
As a poetry-lover, I was stung, mortified. I knew people did not readily take to verse after their bitter struggle with it at school. I also knew hate, like love, could be blind.
It is common knowledge that intense hate can damage the mind. I had no missionary zeal to reform that poetry-hater. Yet I kept baiting her with a variety of simple poems from my numerous anthologies — now a Robert Frost, an Edward Thomas, a Rudyard Kipling, or a Thomas Hardy — and bided my time. Needless to say she finally bit. Now, she bombards me with poems she hunts up on the Internet!
