“I imagine that before I had read any modern poetry I had the same inhibition about reading poetry that most people have all the time. They say, ‘I don’t know how to appreciate this, it’s something that I don’t know anything about.’ There is the feeling that you have to take some kind of course before you can understand a poem which I think prevents people from reading poetry. They think that you cannot simply open a book of poems, start reading and instantly enjoy it. I discovered later on that wasn’t true.”
John Ashbery