Poetry’s verses can instill values in us

Recently a local school boy was awarded a prize for a poem he composed. Joseph Brodsky, Soviet dissident and Nobel Laureate, proposed that all high school freshmen should be presented with the gift of a volume of American verse. What does poetry teach us? Form, structure, discipline, the beauty of our language, imagery and proper usage. As Mark Twain observed, the difference between the correct word and the almost correct word is the difference between “fire” and “firefly.”