Can you understand poetry as a person on the spectrum?

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Thats unfortunate.

The play "Twelve Angry Men" is a great play. BUT... I have permanent hatred of it because I associate the play with a bad humiliating moment in Eighth Grade.

I love poetry and have no problems understanding it. I majored in literature in college.

I think I understand them and appreciate them. Of course if you think about poetry that's not enough, you have to feel them. One needs enough emotions, vulnerability or chaos in their personality to feel deeply. I don't get those days very much.

I think many poets are on the spectrum. That is what makes them good poets.

Only pretty simple ones. Which is really weird. I really enjoy deep novels with hidden layers and meanings more than what's stated. But it hard for me to get it without someone explaining, which makes me feel dumb. Which is weird again, because writing and language arts is one of the things people think I'm most talented in. I hyper fixate while reading and got put in GT because of that category.
I like writing poetry and any adult I've ever shown my poetry has complemented it in some way and thought it was deep and complicated, even when it wasn't particularly supposed to be. I still don't even like reading poetry, because of the annoying overanalyzing, that makes me feel like I don't understand it, and also because the majority of poetry just doesn't make any sense and people are reading way too much into it.

I can understand some poetry though not all of it, in fact I used to be able to write poetry in fact; however after a traumatic brain injury several years ago, I'm no longer able to do that.

Talking for myself, as long as I remember I have written poetry, sometimes using metaphors and analogies that neurotypicals are incapable of understanding.

Never understood poetry, which is weird cause I wrote songs for a living for 20 years
Without a melody poetry is too complicated to understand. Just like I need overly exaggerated facial features in order to understand 2nd degree when someone is speaking.
I love writing prose however. Been writing since I was a kid. I am quite good with metaphores because I see the world through some kind of Disney lens, all flying dragons and unicorns everywhere.
And yet poetry and I never got along. We're kind of like twin sisters who have nothing in common.

People with autism may start out with problems comprehending emotions, non-literal language, or other people's mental states. But for many this actually leads to overcorrection. Once they start to push themselves to understand, they actually can understand better than most neurotypicals. Many with autism have a heightened ability to recognize patterns and structures. Autistics are more likely to be on the extremes than NTs. Poorly understanding or doing something, or in some way excelling.

Never been able to read or write poetry. It just doesn't make sense to me. I understand and enjoy rhyme but that's not the same thing. I don't have any problem with abstract or allegorical prose but poetry for some reason just doesn't work for me.

I love (good) poetry but it's challenging and requires effort which I'm not usually willing to put in, so I rarely read poetry. But when I was in college and there was poetry I had to read (and the poetry we read in class was some of the best ever written) I was blown away by how wonderful it was.

I think that to understand great poetry you have to kind of get the hang of how it works and how to approach it, and then it becomes accessible, and the more you read the more it opens up.

I read Stephen Fry's book on how to enjoy poetry because it annoyed me that I couldn't understand it.

I don't know the book, but did it help?

I think that too. And I like to add that it's likely that many prose and novel writers are as well. As a reader of poetry and fiction I like to think that my understanding is better than the average NT reader's.

No. I still don't understand poetry! I understand more about it than I did before, in terms of how it is crafted. Things like meter and rhyme and the conventions of various formal poetry styles. The book tries to teach you by giving you poetry writing exercises. I did them okay.

But I still don't enjoy reading it, or know what I'm supposed to be learning from a poem. I have no emotional response to it, unless it's funny in some way.