Poetry has been used as a one of teaching media that often used in English language learning. Besides offering benefits, the use of poetry in language class gives challenges to the learners. This research aimed to find out the students’ perception about the use of poetry in a Literary Appreciation class. The researcher used qualitative method and the researcher used descriptive qualitative as the design of the research. To gather the data, this researcher used interview as the data gathering technique and the interview guideline as the instrument. This research took place at one of private universities in Yogyakarta. The participants of the study were four English major students who actively joined the Literary Appreciation class. The findings of this research showed that the benefits of using poetry in English language learning were increasing vocabulary, improving pronunciation, understanding type of poetry, improving writing poetry, knowing the right intonation, understanding the meaning of poetry, and understanding figurative language. In addition, the finding also shows the challenges and the strategy. The first strategy is imitating to help the students choose the appropriate word and understanding the tone of poetry. The second is using a dictionary to help the students to know unfamiliar words. Then, asking others to help the students to understand the complicated words, unfamiliar pronunciation and choose the right word. The last is translating to help the students to know the unfamiliar vocabulary and understanding the meaning of poetry.