When a thought has found words

Poetry is the forgotten child of literature. Few people read it for pleasure. In Western high schools, poetry is seldom taught because it is considered to be out of date and have little to do with the life of today's students.

However, compared with the situation in the West, poetry is still an important part of the curriculum （课程）in China. Recently, the Ministry of Education has increased the number of ancient Chinese poems for students to memorize and recite, from 14 to 

72. Why is it important to learn poems? 

First of all, poetry is a necessary part of learning traditional Chinese culture. It is a path to understanding your history and your society. It is also the key to understanding the thoughts and feelings that are common to everyone but that we may be unable to express, the joy of Li Bai dancing with the moon, for example. Everyone has feelings of joy, love, loneliness, sadness and even anger, and a good poem can put those feelings into words and bring us self-understanding. 

Poems can also express beauty. In a few short lines, even something common can become beautiful. Here is a poem called Fog by Carl Sandberg: The fog comes/on silent haunches （弓腰）/and then moves on. Yes, a fog does move smoothly, silently and like a cat, and Sandberg catches that feeling and image, and makes it beautiful. 

Of course, to really enjoy poetry, it has to be read aloud. After all, a poem is really just a song without music. Most ancient poems, like Homer's Epics （《荷马史诗》）and China's Book of Songs, were spoken for hundreds of years before they were written.

The American poet Robert Frost said, "Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words." You are lucky that you now have seventy-two poems to learn!