Poetry and Understanding (II)

4 February 2016
I’ve just said we should not approach poetry as if the goal were merely to understand it. Why not? What happens if we do?
The first thing we get, already mentioned in my first post on the question, is annoyance. When someone reads a poem with the goal of mastering its meaning, expecting the text to do what it can to facilitate that goal, that reader will soon be frustrated. The poem is far more likely to throw up stumbling blocks to comprehension – convoluted sentence structure, complex diction, strange (or invented) vocabulary – and in every way possible draw attention away from the sense of the poem and force the reader to pay attention to the fact that she is reading a poem.
Martin Heidegger makes this point in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” where he distinguishes between “equipmental” language and the language of poetry. Equipmental language has an external purpose and in order to serve that purpose must stay in the background. One is not supposed to notice the language of an expository text, just as one is not supposed to notice one’s shoes. If you are aware of your shoes, then they are not doing their job, and if you are aware of the diction used in a newspaper column, it needed a better editor. Poetry is not like that. At every stage, poetry calls attention to itself, stepping into the foreground and forcing external meaning into the shadows, calling attention to itself as art – that is, declaring that it is significant because of what it is, and not just because of what it does.
(Once again, note the similarity between encountering poetry and meeting people. While all humans have greater depth than can be seen in one superficial encounter, there are certainly those who do their best to be equipmental, defining themselves entirely in terms of their employment. These people are very dull. A poem written for a clear polemical purpose inevitably feels less interesting as a poem, and a man who defines himself entirely as a minister or engineer or doctor or poet is equally uninteresting as a person.)
So, reading a poem equipmentally leads to frustration, as one looks for understanding and is thwarted. But there is an even worse result of reading poetry equipmentally, and oddly enough, this one is made those who understand poetry.
You see, one can learn certain techniques that facilitate greater understanding of a poem’s content. One can learn to pay attention to the rhythms, to the verse structures, to enjambment, to wordplay and so on. People who master some of these techniques are going to be less frustrated by the obstacles of poetry and will understand poems better. The problem is that when people learn how to understand poetry but still labor under the misapprehension that understanding is the point, they invariably become insufferable snots. “Those plebeians don’t understand poetry as I do,” is their attitude. In short, they’ve turned reading poetry into a sort of word puzzle that they can do better than other people, and their pronouncements on the real meaning of this poem or that have the smug tone of someone saying, “Oh, I used to do the New York Times Sunday Crossword – in pen, of course – but lately I’ve found them to be ridiculously easy.” Yes, these people are able to dredge more meaning from a poem – sometimes even meanings that the poet herself or himself might recognize – but they’ve still missed the point every bit as much as the person who tossed the poem aside in frustration. Again, the point is not to understand the poem but to encounter it, and greater understanding is no guarantee of a more meaningful encounter.
In the end, these smug, poetically-literate elitists do more damage to poetry than do those who don’t understand it at all. A poetic snob is to poetry what a streetcorner evangelist is to Christianity – a bane – because the most reasonable and appropriate response to both is, “Why would I want to do something that associates me with that asshole?”
But when we put aside our need to understand poetry and read a poem with the same sort of expectation with which we encounter a new person – willing to be enriched by the acquaintaince but expecting it to take a while – then we are reading poetry as it should be read. Poetry may be the only written genre where it’s completely acceptable to say, “I like this! I don’t understand it, but I like it!”

Not just acceptable, in fact, but ideal.