I've been punched in the gut by a story but yea, not a thing from a poem. Not ever. Maybe a good monologue in a movie, sure, but not because of the poetry of it, just the acting.
If you really want to be 'moved', don't bother with any poem less than 200 years old.
The poems that remain after 300 years are even better... Unfortunately, you start running into problems in that more work is put into deciphering the archaic English than enjoying the ideas expressed.
The point is, 99.9% of modern poetry sucks. It's not you.
I don't believe that that's what's going on here. The majority of all poetry sucks. As does the majority of all music, novels, paintings etc.
But the ones that don't suck persist. That's why it seems that older poetry is better, because we've forgotten/ignored the dross.
This tendency has been exacerbated in some fields by the split between art for marketing purposes and art for commercial purposes. But that hasn't really affected poetry, most of it's poor because most poets aren't very good.
I was involved in a project to create an anthology of poems. I spent much time reviewing previous anthologies, published in the 1800s, of 'contemporary' poems... that is, the books contained the best poems written during the period the book was published.
And, the verdict? The overwhelming bulk of the poems were terrible.
Just curious. Do you find some combination of words more "beautiful" then other combination of words that says more or less the same thing?
For example "I wandered lonely as a cloud" vs "I wandered alone, like a cloud".
I feel no difference between your two phrases, but the editor in me is triggered to think "should've wrote 'i wandered like a cloud.'"
I can think of specific writing that really worked for me. Peter Watts for example described the passing of one spaceship "under" a blacked out space station, describing how the only thing the astronauts could see were surfaces lit up by their own ship's thruster fire, behind them, casting long shadows ahead. I liked that.
Thought thunk this before, and here we are again. An identity function, an old familiar friend.
Thought thunk this before, and here we are again. A rhythm repeating, the beginning and the end.
But I don't feel anything from poetry.
I've described it as like being tone-deaf but to poetry. The majority of poems make me feel nothing, and the ones where I do feel something is more because of the story than because it's in the form of a poem. I think that for the poems I do feel an emotional response to, I could experience the same emotional response without the form of the poem as long as the same story was there.
One of the few poems I felt an emotional response towards was Shel Silverstein's "Masks" that I read as a kid. It was a short poem and I think I responded to it because of the story it told, and not necessarily because of the form.
I wonder if you feel similarly. Do you feel something towards poems that tell a compelling story or do you never feel any emotional response to anything written in the form of a poem?