Elisa Gabbert at the NYT:
Here is some of the greatest, most practical advice I’ve heard on how to start reading poetry: “A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written. We read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere; we may get very little out of A). We read B the better to read C, C the better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out of A.”
These lines come from Robert Frost’s brief essay “The Prerequisites,” on first encountering and not understanding — not fully — an Emerson poem. Some 50 years later, “the poem turned up again” and lo, it made more sense, “all but two lines of it.” The working and thinking we do in a lifetime equips us, but even toward the end of life, we’ll never be perfectly equipped, so we might as well get comfortable with partial understanding.
The worldview this suggests is as freeing as believing in fate. It teaches trust and patience, since any poem has things to show us about the others.
more here.
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