[tangerine_beet]

The author suggests that knowing poetry's rules, and the history of how poets have broken those rules, can help people "get" poetry. I'm skeptical that cerebral understanding alone can help much. On the rare occasion that I've "gotten" a poem, it never happened through reason. If I tried analyzing while reading it I don't think the getting could have happened at all.

As stated I don't get many poems, but I feel that cultivating the ability to get them probably has something to do with: 1) awareness of your own emotional state in the present moment; it's the needed reference point to connect with the poet's state at time of writing 2) awareness of your accumulated life experience -- it's the material you reference to make sense of the poem 3) sensitivity to the sounds & rhythms of words 4) a broad perspective on life that includes awareness of its ultimate frame -- death; Spanish poet Lorca wrote about a creative force called 'duende' that arises from experience of the darker side of life; I think such experience may also give rise to a receptiveness to and appreciation of the more significant things conveyed in poetry and other arts 5) desire and ability to connect content of a poem to other things, be they other poems, history, the poet's personal history or whatever; poems are not islands, they have contexts, and your moment of reading one also has a context consisting of your personal intellectual history and current mental and emotional state, among other things.

[jfengel]

Cerebral understanding can help carry you further inside how a poem works, and increase your enjoyment of it. It's a lot like the scientist who asks in wonder "Why does it do that?"

But you first start with the sense of wonder coming to you unaided, and the author makes a mistake in assuming that. You're absolute right that you can't think your way into that sense of wonder.

There are poems that inspire it, though they vary from person to person. And it will change through your life. If you feel it, you can be like a scientist, and study it, increasing the feeling for yourself without losing that sense of wonder.

It may increase your taste for the more exotic and abstruse, but the author makes a mistake that those exotic ones are better and more meritorious. The more exotic they are, the more personal the appeal will be. It really sucks that some people get to be elites and tell you which ones are the good ones -- and then they get to write the textbooks.