Yes, the good stuff does. Then again, most good literature does.



Yes. Mainly because of Ayn Rand.



Naturally.



It makes you pay attention to language. And it either forces you to stop and think or it sweeps you away. Both are powerful things.




Hmm. That is a tricky question.
It varies a lot depending on when and how I am. I had a major thing for Poe's "Alone" at the beginning of high school, and it still has the perfect rhythm for me, I think.

And I really, really like Stanislaw Lem's poem in the Cyberiad on "Love and Tensor Algebra" (which I have only read in English translation).

I love Burns when he is playful (which he is quite often). Like the really short ones:


Thou graybeard, old Wisdom! may boast of thy treasures;
Give me with old Folly to live;
I grant thee thy calm-blooded, time-settled pleasures,
But Folly has raptures to give.

or


I'm now arrived -- thanks to the gods! --
Thro' pathways rough and muddy,
A certain sign that makin' roads
Is not this people's study:

Altho' I'm not wi' Scripture cram'd
I'm sure the Bible says
That heedless sinners shall be damn'd
Unless they mend their ways.

But I also love reading Dante out loud in the Italian. I don't always understand it all, but it always sounds divine.

And more. But quite often I love parts of poems rather than the whole.



So many.
Keats is up there, Sapfo, Catullus, Dante, Shakespeare, Spenser, Rochester (who is the one that should be taught in schools if you want kids to read poetry), Blake, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Ronsard, Mallarmé, McGonagall (for sheer hilarity), and more I am sure.

Jens Bjørneboe, Rudolf Nilsen, Nordahl Grieg and Arnulf Øverland among the Norwegians.



I read them.



They will give you pleasure.