People seldom feel neutral about poetry(诗). Those who love it sometimes give the impression that it is an adequate substitution for food, shelter, and love. It isn't. Words, no matter how satisfying, are never an equivalent for life itself and its human experiences. Those who dislike poetry on principle sometimes claim, on the other hand, that poetry is only words and good for nothing. That's not true either. It is easy to become frustrated by words—in poetry or in life—but when words represent and recreate genuine human feelings, as they often do in poetry, they can be very important. Poetry is, in fact, more than just words. It is an experience of words, and those who know how to read poetry can easily ex- tend their experience of life, their sense of what other people are like, their awareness of themselves, and their range of human feelings. One reason poetry can be so important is that it is so closely concerned with feelings. Poetry is often full of ideas, too, and sometimes poems can be powerful experiences of the mind, but most poems are primarily about how people feel rather than how people think. Poems provide, in fact, a language for feeling, and one of poetry's most insistent merits involves its attempt to express the inexpressible. How can anyone, for example, put into words what it means to be in love or what it feels like to lose someone one cares about? Poetry tries, and it often captures exactly the shade of emotion that feels just right to a reader. No single poem can be said to express all the things that love or death feels like, or means, but one of the joys of experiencing poetry occurs when we read a poem and want to say, 'Yes, that is just what it is like I know exactly what that line means but I've never been able to express it so well ' Poetry can be the voice of our feelings even when our minds are speechless with grief or joy. 'People seldom feel neutral about poetry' (in Para. 1) in this context means that______.