Poems as open, democratic spaces.

 

                                                   Photo by Norbert Braun on Unsplash 

'The problem most readers have is that they want to understand through paraphrase. They want to compel the poem to make a prose statement. At school I was taught that poems have 'hidden meanings', which one could get at only by means of analysis, but once located the poem could be 'understood' and its magic in some way controlled. The opposite is true. Poems are wonderfully open, democratic spaces. They may ask us to read them several times before we understand the balances and contrasts, the lights and shadows, that they offer, but they are for the most part not deliberately obscure. Few make sense in the way prose makes sense. Those that seem to — Robert Frost's, for example, or William Carlos William's, or John Betjeman's — probably mean rather more than they seem to and they require more focused attention from us. No good poem makes common sense: the essence of a good poem is the uncommonness of the sense it makes. It is a structuring of words in which many meanings, or meanings at many levels, are enacted. If we read poems as prose, they have very little to say.'

From the Introduction to The Great Modern Poets: An Anthology of the Best Poets and Poetry since 1900, Edited by Michael Schmidt, Published by Quercus.

https://poetrybusiness.co.uk/book-author/michael-schmidt/