“Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.” — Paul Engle.

These lines by Paul Engle, the author of The New York Times beautifully explain how poetry is not just the “tough skin of words” whose intent is to articulate ideas and opinions but also a tool “nerved and blooded with emotions” which can help humans express themselves better and make them more sensible and emotionally intelligent.

The process of poetry reading can be started from the early days of childhood itself. Some benefits of reading poetry since childhood are as follows: –

1. Reading Poetry Motivates Kids To Read

Reading poetry is fun for children, but at the same time, it helps them hone their reading skills, literacy skills, and vocabulary. It is seen that as children start to read poetry, they get motivated to read. It is no secret that motivation to read comes from storybooks too but since poetry is short and a lot more meaningful it excites children more than ordinary books, storybooks, or encyclopedias.

2. Helps Them To Navigate Emotions

Reading poetry to children can do wonders, especially in helping them navigate their own emotions and feelings by transporting them to a whole new world altogether and making them learn about its complexity and question its intricacies. When children read poetry that talks about positive aspects of life like hope, love, and friendship, it helps them forget or more simply overcome their sadness. They try to inculcate positive things in their life by getting inspired by them. Poetry even helps them to discuss these topics in their lives more openly.

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3. Helps In Making Their Own Decisions

Children may pay close attention to the sublime nature of the experiences, how the characters find their way through life and struggles and may reflect upon their own decisions, their own possibilities. The effect can be much more profound when they themselves are reading poetry.

4. Improves Kids’ Interpretation Skills

Engaging children in reading poetry allows them to cultivate interpretation skills, as poetry requires coming up with your own understanding of the ideas presented, of the way in which it is structured, and of the significance of poetic techniques, rhyme scheme and metaphors employed in the piece of work.

5. Helps In Decision Making

Since poetry departs from what the author intended to what the reader makes of it, the exercise of reading poetry also provides decision making and agency in children, making them much more confident of their own ideas and reflections.’

Helps Them To Improve Their Speech And Language

At the outset, the experience of reading poetry (especially reading it aloud) also activates senses, as poetry plays with sounds in the form of alliterations, rhyme schemes, and enjambments. It may make the words pace up and slow down; it may induce breaks and pauses at regular or irregular intervals, making children learn intonation, thereby improving their speech and language.

7. Improves Imagination And Creativity

It is a multisensory experience that boosts imagination and provides a window of opportunity to think in creative ways. The process of appreciating surroundings starts with appreciating art, and especially appreciating poetry. Given that reading poetry is an exercise of noticing patterns, extricating ideas and themes, and becoming aware of the underlying motifs, it makes children more perceptive towards things in general. It induces poetic sensibility in children, permitting children to draw connections between things, ideas and unknown structures.

Finally, it energizes the mind, making it more alert which helps children think rationally and practically.

Undeniably, poetry provokes these characteristics in children, but they are not transient. People whose childhood is governed by poetry reading exercises go on to become much more sensible, appreciable and emotionally intelligent human beings.

Conclusion

Therefore, it becomes very important for children to read poetry from the early years of their childhood as it would help in language development, cognitive development, and social development. So, it’s time to choose a nice poetry book for your child, and recite poems together aloud. The benefits of doing so will pay off for the rest of their lives.

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