Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early. ↗
Because I come from that old-school optics environment, I know stuff about depth of field and camera movement and things that are not necessarily a part of the curriculum for people who started on a box and have never done anything that wasn't on a box. ↗
Like everybody at that age, I read an awful lot of pulp fiction. But at the same time, I also read quite a bit of history and read that as much for pleasure as part of a curriculum. ↗