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Early in the film Dead Poet's Society we have a scene where the literature teacher, Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams is teaching from the approved text book, and he has a student read from the preface of Understanding Poetry, by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D.
To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme, and figures of speech. Then ask two questions: One, how artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered, and two, how important is that objective. Question one rates the poem's perfection, question two rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining a poem's greatest becomes a relatively simple matter. If the poem's score for perfection is plotted along the horizontal of a graph, and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness. original screenplay by Tom Schulman, film directed by Peter Weir
Of course, the punch line of this scene is when the teacher informs the class that graphing the vertical Perfection and the horizontal importance of a poem is excrement
The teacher feels that this attempt at turning literature into something that can be scientifically analyzed is poop pure, stinky, and simple.
in my class you will learn to think for yourselves again. You will learn to savor words and language. No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world. original screenplay by Tom Schulman, film directed by Peter Weir
The position of the fictional Mr. Keating seems to reflect the a sort of sixties approach that rules don't matter, it is how the work makes you feel. Does the poem move you?
This, "does it move you" approach to understanding, and writing poetry has lead to a bunch of poetry that is sloppy, excessively esoteric and nearly impossible to decipher.
There was a growing trend in all the arts to throw the traditions and the rules out the window and just be moved. This movement can be seen in the stream of consciousness novels of James Joyce (Finnegan's Wake), the splatter paintings of Jackson Pollock, and millions of poems that fill the ear or mind with a jumble of images and words that fill the mouth like a raw egg, but make little if any sense.
Look at the opening lines from one of Americas prolific and often published poets, James Dickey
THE SHEEP-CHILD Farm boys wild to couple
With anything with soft-wooded trees
With mounds of earth mounds
Of pine straw will keep themselves off
Animals by legends of their own:
In the hay-tunnel dark
And dung of barns, they will
Say I have heard tell
That in a museum in Atlanta
Way back in a corner somewhere
There's this thing that's only half
Sheep like a woolly baby
Pickled in alcohol because
Those things can't live his eyes
Are open but you can't stand to look
I heard from somebody who ...
Copyright 1966 by James Dickey.
The poem may make sense, to someone, but it is not simple sense, nor is it apparent, or obvious sense. The average person is not going to read these lines and go, "Wow, that's neat-o mosquito." It just seems that for a time, poets tried to intentionally write stuff that could not be understood. The more personal, esoteric, abstract the poem was, the deeper the work was suppose to seem.
Instead of looking at how the image of a bird represented the grieving child's desire to escape this misery of death, the readers were left saying, "When I read this poem I feel like I'm getting smaller and smaller." Uh, what?
Of course, just because abstract expressionist art and abstract expressionist poetry are esoteric doesn't mean that graphing a poems perfection and greatness is the way to go.
There is a newish trend in poetry to make the poem easy to understand. This doesn't mean there are not cryptic lines and odd passages, but the goal of these new poets is to keep the reader in mind, and to communicate something to the reader.
In the 1960's is seems that poets wanted to be impossible to understand, assuming that the more enigmatic their poem might be the better it was. After all, if you don't understand a poem and everyone around you is oo-ing and ahhh-ing, it is easy to think, "Maybe I'm just to dumb to get it. It is better (of safer as far as my personal ego goes) to just go along acting impressed."
There are some steps one can follow that might help you understand a poem better.
Step 1
Read the poem two, or three times. At least one of those read-throughs should be done by reading out loud. There are, at times when hearing the poem will give you clues you would never get from a silent reading.
Step 2
Look at the title. It isn't always important, but it is an opportunity for a good writer to add meaning to the work.
Step 3
Pick out words or phrases you do not understand in the poem and look them up. If the poem contains words you don't know, then until you do know, you won't know all that the poem has to offer.
Step 4
Ask, who is the speaker. While a lot of poems are confessional poems expressing the emotions of the writer, poetry is still a literary word and you can't assume that the speaker in the poem is the writer of the poem. Robert Frost has several narrative poems where the speaker is a female. Know where the poem takes place, in what era, what time of the year. Understanding such things will help you with point of view, and imagery.
Step 5
Study the poem line by line noting the style. A good poetry book such as "The Poetry Handbook" by Mary Oliver, or the Purdue University's Online Writing Lab http://owl.english.purdue.edu/ can be useful if you are need some instruction regarding basic poetic terms and techniques regarding fixed forms, meter, rhyme, personification, verisimilitude, onomatopoeia, etc.
Step 5
The type of poem matters. A narrative poem by Frost, is telling a story, and can, to some degree, be studied and understood like, say, a short story might be studied and interpreted. A poet like Ted Kooser writes a lot of poems that I call slice of life, or a snap-shot poems. A haiku is just a verbal capture of an instant image. Lyrical poems, love poems, letter poems, listing poems, all would be looked at differently.
Step 6
Brainstorm the images you find and what things mean and how they make you feel to help unravel the theme and tone of the poem.
Step 7
Determine the meaning of the poem by putting all of the previous elements together. A poet creates his work by combining words, images and emotions to convey a point. Once you have now broken them down individually, you can see how they work together to convey a central message or theme.
Step 8
Read lots of poetry. The more you expose yourself to a variety of poetic works, the easier it is going to be to understand new poems you come across. Reading a lot of poetry is the second best activity for a person who wants to be a poet. The first best activity is writing poetry. Really, if you want to write poetry, you should follow rules 1a (write poetry) and 1b (read lots of poetry).
Tex Norman is a Child Welfare worker, who likes to write. He sees ugliness every day. Writing is how he tries to think through the difficulties of life.
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