Literature will always have an effect on people, whether ti reaches to the deepest parts of their heart and touch them in ways that they never quite expected, or if it makes them laugh. In a similar respect, some people treat reading both poetry and any other sort of literature, such as fiction, as a task instead of leisure as most do.
Randall Jarrell wrote a poem entitled The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner about a young man in World War 2 as a gunner in a B-17 or B-24 airplane. The poem starts as simple as leaving home and going into the war, but by the final line of the poem, the disturbing line of "When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose", which creates a very disturbing image for anyone.
If someone who has never done background research on World War 2 may be taken a bit by surprise by this and though everyone is aware of how violent it was, they may not expect such an abrupt end. I've done plenty of research on World War 2, so this came as no surprise but it always creates a sort of curiosity.
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