Why Are Poems So Difficult To Read? And How To Read Them
Poetry never came naturally to me, and whenever people in my class raved about their favourite poems, it felt like they were talking about some obscure band I’d never heard of.
But avoiding poetry as an English major is like refusing to vacuum the floor below the bed. So, I bit the bullet this semester and took a class with a reading list full of poems from Wordsworth and Coleridge.
When the professor released the first batch of readings, the poetic language perplexed me. I asked myself: this poem is written in English and I speak English, but why doesn’t it make any sense?
At first, I took a brute-force approach and tried to parse a poem line by line. But by the time I worked through the first part of The Prelude I wanted to throw the book out of the window and wondered how any sane person could claim to love Wordsworth.
This led me down a spiral of reading about the theory of poetry, and what I discovered completely changed how I read poems. A few weeks later, I turned into someone who raved about Wordsworth and teared up when I read Prufrock for the fifth time. So, in this letter, I’d like to share a few lessons I gathered from my poetic misadventures.
1: Maybe poems are supposed to be obscure
Let’s address the age-old question: This poem is written in English, and I speak English, but why doesn’t it make any sense? Sometimes, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why can’t poets write normally? But after a little digging, I realized maybe writing obscurely was the point.
In Edmund Burke’s pompously titled treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (though I loathe Burke with a passion he did have a good point or two when it comes down to poetry), he dedicated a section to the obscurity of poetry:
“There are reasons in nature why the obscure idea, when properly conveyed, should be more affecting than the clear. It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions.”
Whereas
“Knowledge and acquaintance make the most striking causes affect but little.”
This is certainly true for prose. A beautifully written sentence doesn’t reveal everything all at once but encourages the reader to fill in the blank. This creates a resonance that’s deeply personal, and this is how you get the holy shit moments when you read a line from a novel that sticks in your head. But something like philosophical writing, while it is intellectually rigorous, puts us to sleep as the philosopher laboriously overexplains everything. Hence, knowledge’s role is not to produce passion or affect, and poetry’s job is not to reveal everything clearly.
My fatal mistake was reading poetry like philosophy, making many dead poets turn in their graves. Imagine spending decades getting the tempo, meter and imageries right, only to have a hooligan (like me) ignore all the poetic beauty and ask stupid questions like: what does it all mean?!! or why can’t you write clearly?!! This leads me to my second point.
2: There’s a lot more to Poetry Than Just Its Meaning
If reading poetry is all about discovering what it means, then all the poetry professors would dust their hands and resort to stamp-licking as a profession. Most of the interesting discussions in poetry stem from ambiguity and the art of expressing a thought, not from the thought itself.
Consider the meter of a poem. The dactylic hexameter, for example, creates a war-like atmosphere, which is perfect for epic stories like The Iliad and The Odyssey. Meanwhile, someone like Yeats used the iambic tetrameter in some of his poems to make it sound like a nursing rhyme, which was perfect for telling an old myth.
Also, consider the word choice of a poem. If a poet used the word “orange”, did they imply the colour orange or the fruit orange? What about a more loaded word like: “awesome”? Did they imply the religious awe-some or an exclamation of excitement?
Great poems encourage the readers to interpret them in myriad ways, and each new way of reading can produce a different effect. (This is why it’s important to read poems out loud if you’re stuck because sometimes there’s even a difference there.) And the joy of reading poetry lies in the ambiguity, not in a single “I got it!” moment. This brings me to my next point.
3: Re-read, re-read, re-read
Our fast-paced culture is almost antithetical to appreciating poetry, and nowadays poetry sure reads like rambles that are artificially broken into stanzas. And when we’re presented with something that takes some work to read, we either freeze or run away. So, given that there are so many hidden nooks and crannies in a poem, maybe it’s unwise to read them too fast.
I compare it to re-listening to your favourite song. We can never decide if we like the song or not upon our first listening. But if it’s a good song, something lingers and encourages us to listen to it again, then again, and again, until one day something hits and it becomes our favourite forever.
The same goes for poetry. The first reading is only a shallow impression, and to truly suck the marrow out of a good poem, we must read it repeatedly until something hits and it becomes our favourite thing (or not).
