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There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

John Ashbery

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John Ashbery
Age: 90 †
Born: 1927
Born: July 28
Died: 2017
Died: September 3
Journalist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Rochester
New York
G'on Ashberi
John Ashberry
Jonas Barry
Jon Asshuberī
John Lawrence Ashbery
John Ashbery
Views
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Improve
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Salvation
People
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Poetry

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Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture, A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.
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Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
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I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.
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Its a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a fleeting second Must be replaced by unperfect knowledge of the featureless whole Like some pocket history of the world, so general As to constitute a sob or wail
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And just as there are no words for the surface, that is, No words to say what it really is, that it is not Superficial but a visible core, then there is No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.
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The soul establishes itself. But how far can it swim out through the eyes And still return safely to its nest?
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Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
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Until, accustomed to disappointments, you can let yourself rule and be ruled by these strings or emanations that connect everything together, you haven't fully exorcised the demon of doubt that sets you in motion like a rocking horse that cannot stop rocking.
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Life is not at all what you might think it to be A simple tale where each thing has its history It's much more than its scuffle and anything goes Both evil and good, subject to the same laws.
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We are prisoners of the world's demented sink. The soft enchantments of our years of innocence Are harvested by accredited experience Our fondest memories soon turn to poison And only oblivion remains in season.
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The winter does what it can for its children.
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To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.
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... the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon.
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Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.
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The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how...
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Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision
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All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
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The mind Is so hospitable, taking in everything Like boarders, and you don't see until It's all over how little there was to learn Once the stench of knowledge has dissipated.
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Silly girls your heads full of boys
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Life is beautiful. He who reads that As in the window of some distant, speeding train Knows what he wants, and what will befall.
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