How to find more of yourself to use

 Kenneth Rexroth said this about the value of poetry:

“We recognize in American society that our whole program of education — the kind of man we turn out — is open to serious criticism. We do not produce well-rounded men. The value of poetry in education is just this: that it produces a deeper and wider and more intense response to life. The presumption is not that we will be better men — that’s up to us — but that deeply familiar with poetry, we will respond to life, its problems, and its people, its things, objects, everything, in a much more universal way, and that we will use much more of ourselves.”

Rexroth sometimes strikes me as a cantankerous grouch. But often, he strikes me as a fellow who gets to the heart of the matter. I think he does so in this case.

By a happy accident, I started to read poetry when I was 23. The registrar at the university discovered I’d managed to finish all the requirements of a degree — except that I didn’t have a single credit of English. So the authorities sent me to take a sophomore poetry course in my final semester.

I went reluctantly, but that class made me a lifelong reader of poetry. The habit of reading poetry changed the way I respond to life, to problems, to people. I have, as Rexroth claimed, found more of myself to use.

The quotation comes from his essay “The Poetry of the Far East 
in a General Education,” published in 1958. Even then, people were concerned about the kind of person who comes out of the educational system.