Reading poetry is like eating applesauce with pork

I hate obligatory combinations of foods - applesauce with pork, mint jelly with lamb (where did that idea come from anyway?), cranberry sauce with turkey, and all the rest. I only eat them when somebody forces me. Which is what I mean, about poetry. And why I haven't read much of it since I got out of school.

Here's one that was popular back then:

No man is an island, entire of itself.
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
As well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls.
It tolls for thee.

Some guy named John Donne wrote that. I sort of liked that one, but don't tell.

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