I had this same aversion towards literature written in my mother-tongue viz. Spanish. I eventually surmounted this. Jorge Luis Borges was a revelation to me. I'm more comfortable reading texts composed in Spanish now. Generally, I favor English. You could look into Alexander Pope. Your experience as a student evidently detracted from your savoring of poetry. I won't delve into why people enjoy poetry. That's pointless. The highest form of expression is devoid of form. It rests upon an intuition, upon a primordial yearning.
"If beauty awaits discovery everywhere, that is to say that it waits upon our recollection: in aesthetic contemplation as in love and knowledge, we momentarily recover the unity of our being released from individuality. There are no degrees of beauty; the most complex and the simplest expression remind us of one and the same state…"
- That Beauty is a State, A.K. Coomaraswamy