What is Poetry?
Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme, but this is by no means necessary. Poetry is an ancient form that has gone through numerous and drastic reinvention over time. The very nature of poetry as an authentic and individual mode of expression makes it nearly impossible to define.
Poetry is the ultimate expression of the human language, manipulating the rich features that the language contains as well as exploiting its quirks in order to condense the maximum meaning, emotion, description and experience into each line.
How Do We Get Students To Enjoy Poetry?
I believe that in order to get students to engage with poetry we must deliver it to them in a fun and enjoyable manner. Poetry is literally 'playing with words' so that is the main thing to remember. We should not just get them to read and disect author's poems, but rather get them express themselves through creating their own poetry so that they can gain an appreciation for the style. Once they we have fostered this enjoyment of poetry and the mastery of language that fuels the genre, students will be able to analyse and interepret the poetic literature which they are presented.

Robert Frost
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who say fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Oodgeroo Noonucal
Municipal Gum
Gumtree in the city street,
Hard bitumen around your feet,
Rather you should be
In the cool world of leafy forest halls
And wild bird calls
Here you seems to me
Like that poor cart-horse
Castrated, broken, a thing wronged,
Strapped and buckled, its hell prolonged,
Whose hung head and listless mien express
Its hopelessness.
Municipal gum, it is dolorous
To see you thus
Set in your black grass of bitumen--
O fellow citizen,
What have they done to us?