Like most investment analysts, I spend hours each day reading news articles, earnings reports, financial columns, and websites.

I generally move through these as quickly as possible, scanning for a new insight here or a piece of evidence for or against an investment idea there.

It’s not pleasure reading. My goal is to extract the information I need as quickly as possible.

Time spent this way is the very opposite of reading a poem.

Great poetry forces you to slow down, something we all need to do from time to time. It’s not a race to the finish. It’s a moment of leisure, a time to smile, brood, think or reminisce.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and powerful, a way to draw the universal from the particular.

Samuel Johnson called it “the art of uniting pleasure with truth.” William Hazlitt said poetry is “all that is worth remembering in life.” Carl Sandburg described it as “an echo, asking a shadow to dance.”

At the pace most of us live, however, who among us really has time for poetry?

Not many, apparently. In January, the National Endowment for the Arts released a report showing that in 2008 just 8.3% of adults in the United States had read any poetry in the preceding 12 months, the lowest tally in 16 years.

Some will argue that the problem is modern poetry itself: inaccessible, irrelevant, or just plain bad.

That may be so in some cases. But you don’t have to go for the new stuff. Most of us have read only a tiny fraction of the best poems ever written. Yet as strapped as we are for time, is it worth even bothering with these?

After all, a poem won’t make you stronger, fitter, richer, or better looking. It won’t help you grow your business, cut your taxes or beat the S&P 500.

However, it might deliver something else…

U.S. poet laureate Kay Ryan says “I like to think of my poems as cute mousetraps: innocent looking, but if you get too close you’ll get your head snapped off.”

That describes the feeling many get the first time they read James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”:

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

The reader gets a similar surprise when he first encounters Shelley’s classic poem “Ozymandias”:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

All is vanity, indeed.

(Congratulations, by the way. You’re now part of the 8.3%.)

A surprisingly high percentage of the world’s greatest literature is verse. Much of the Bible is written in poetry from the Psalms to the Prophets, from Job to Ecclesiastes.

We have Homer’s epics “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” the sonnets of Shakespeare, Virgil’s “Aeneid,” Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”

As W. Somerset Maugham said, “The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.”

If you’re new to poetry, don’t feel you have to struggle with Ovid’s Metamorphoses or the often-inscrutable poetry of John Donne. In fact, you can start with the simplest: haiku.

Using simple everyday imagery, haiku creates crystalline images that heighten our awareness and remind us to pause and be present.

Here are just a few favorites:

Bright moon -
strolling around the pond
all night long

Basho

A bush warbler -
and of a hundred men
not one knows it’s there.

Ryokan

Sun rising
over the mountain path -
scent of plums.

Basho

Bitter morning:
sparrows sitting
without necks

James W. Hackett

Barn’s burnt down -
now
I can see the moon.

Masahide

Millions claim they have no time or taste for poetry. But I’m not so sure.

As Wallace Stevens observed, “A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.”

Who doesn’t have time for that?

Carpe Diem,

Alex

P.S. If you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor and rent the film “Il Postino.” And be sure to watch the director’s commentary afterwards - if you don’t mind having your head snapped off twice.