I've always struggled to understand poetry, to the extent that I bought that Stephen Fry book about how to understand poetry. (It is as yet unread.)
I've always responded to Larkin, for some reason. Obviously the depressive slant of it all is in keeping with my own pessimism, but it's also self-evidently elegant and beautiful, without being high-flown.
I managed to teach myself to enjoy poetry a bit more by buying an audiobook of it and listening to it spoken by actors like Anton Lesser. Lesser makes morea 'Ode to a Nightingale', for example, than I ever would have just reading it.
It's really important to recognise that poetry is a different beast to prose, that it demands to be read aloud, or heard. I think there's something musical about poetry, which perhaps explains why I feeel able to 'tap in' to it more when I'm stoned.
Other poets/poems I admire:
Elegy in a country churchyard
http://www.thomasgray.org.uk/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc by Thomas Gray
Quite a few poems by Thomas Hardy (a big influence on Larkin, so no surprises there), including this:
Heredity
I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.
The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance -- that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die
Some Wordsworth, including:
CONTENTS BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
"A SLUMBER DID MY SPIRIT SEAL"
A SLUMBER did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
1799.
I managed to memorise 'Ozymandias' while on holiday, though half of it has already slipped my mind.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/46565