[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.