Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone.
Poetry is meant to inspire readers and listeners, to connect them more deeply to themselves even as it links them more fully to others. But many people feel put off by the terms of poetry, its odd vocabulary, its notorious difficulty.
What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.
Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.
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