Poetry plays an important role in achieving the objectives of extensive reading teaching. However, English poetry teaching is less satisfactory in extensive reading teaching due to learners’ attitudes, traditional teaching methods, and so on. Thus, the author studied the benefits of using English poetry to extensive reading teaching from two aspects: the characteristics of English poetry and the functions of English poetry in extensive reading teaching. The data is collected by a pre- test, post- test and survey methods. The author findings show that a total of 21 of the 30 participants ( 70%) gave survey with positive result. In the end, this researcher put forward some suggestions for how the teacher appropriately makes use of English poetry in extensive reading teaching. Keywords: poetry, extensive reading , characteristics of English poetry, benefits