TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

Interesting. I grew up on this show.

Poetry is pure gibberish to me. I just dont get it. Never have.

So i never knew what the poems were supposed to mean so i dont and never did factor the quality of the poems as written.

Heres how i relate to these scenes in this show

The show is set 300 years from now roughly.

300 years ago was 1700

Data's poems are obviously written for the audience(us) to understand and as such they are actually twentieth century poems both in the real world, but also in the fiction universe as twentieth century style poems written by an android in the twenty fourth century.

Think about that superposition for a second.

Datas poetry to the other characters in the show is essentially just an archaic style that just isnt popular to the culture of the people he is around and data is writing stuff that has been done many times over by people who are way better at it that he is.

Like me writting you reading this a poem that is similar in style to red red rose by robert burns.

My love is like a red red rose.. etc

It being actually good poetry isnt the point, but its a kind of poetry that has already been done and isnt modern poetry to the other members of the crew. They would need a specific interest in the style data was going for becauase in all of datas creative efforts its abundantly clear he is mimicking the forms of art he creates in an attempt to understand emotion. Hes essentially trying to reverse engineer an understanding of emotion by creating new works in a style, and then querying the results to see if the emotions his works create match the style he mimicks and then uses those result to apply to himself. In a shell game kind of way, but not exactly

To put it another way, reading finnegans wake by most people who arent prepared for it, is an incredibly painful experience because yes you can understand and read the words, but that doesnt mean it was an enjoyable experience

Edit: i kinda lost focus here. Might rewrite what im trying to say. Or just delete it later.