Poetry is not a puzzle to be solved. Again: Poetry is not a puzzle to be solved.
Today’s classrooms may teach poetry differently or not at all, but when I was in middle school and high school, poetry was taught with a decoder ring. Imagine sitting in a classroom looking for “like” and “as” for simile and trying to understand personification, metaphor, and all kinds of other literary devices in the text of a poem, rather than discussing reader reaction/feeling to the poem.
Imagine teaching kids in elementary school about “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” by Jan Taylor:
Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are! Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky. When the blazing sun is gone, When he nothing shines upon, Then you show your little light, Twinkle, twinkle, all the night. Then the traveler in the dark Thanks you for your tiny spark, How could he see where to go, If you did not twinkle so? In the dark blue sky you keep, Often through my curtains peep For you never shut your eye, Till the sun is in the sky. As your bright and tiny spark Lights the traveler in the dark, Though I know not what you are, Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
See the bolded partial line - simile is here. But what is this poem actually talking about? Is it about stars being diamonds?
Yes, simplistic poem to bring up when talking about the decoder ring, but you get the idea.
I spent too much time in class looking for literary devices rather than talking about the poem and the impression it leaves on the reader. Most students walk away thinking poetry is too hard to understand.
Language choice is important when writing a poem. Choosing a word because of the feeling it evokes (e.g., love vs. lust) or because of the color it calls to the mind of the reader (e.g., blue vs. navy). Or if you are equating a particular tree type to a human characteristic, etc., and in some cases, our vernacular can signal to readers where we come from, such as calling soda “pop” or “coke.” These things are important for writing poems.
Does that mean they are less important when reading poems?
Not necessarily, but in classrooms we fail to teach young readers about reaction/response to poems. What feeling does it give you? What do you understand about the poem and its subject? Is that influenced by your own experiences? How so? Poetry is a dialogue with the reader; and I will argue that’s truer with poetry than other literary genres. Poetry requires you to be in that moment with the poet. It requires you to feel, see, touch, and hear that moment.
I wish my teachers had thought to just let us read and react to poetry. I wish they had required us to read poems aloud more. I wish they had experimented with tone and emphasis in readings — demonstrating how you read a poem can modify its meaning and tone. Poetry is a reflection of our human condition in the rawest form.
Poetry is not a puzzle — it is a reflection of the human puzzle we have been, are, and become over time.
The poetry itself is not the puzzle. It is humanity and poetry is a way for us to puzzle out our contradictions and complications.
You don't have to downplay one method to uplift another. My poetry classes taught both. I learned to first just feel what the poem wanted me to feel, then react to it, then analyze it. All three are important elements of understanding poetry.
So well said! I wish in school we actually were taught more about poetry and poets and discussing our responses to it. Maybe if we all would have been poetry would have been a more habitual experience for many.