Reading About Poems

What is the difference between reading a poem and reading about a poem? Poems do not generally offer information; they dramatize emotional experience.

Reading a poem is not like reading a newspaper article. We don't even read those two genres for the same purpose. We read newspapers to get information; we read poetry to get back experience.

Therefore, when we read a poem, we need to read it many times, slowly--unlike reading solely for information, when we read as fast as possible to get as much information as possible in as little time as possible.

Reading about poetry, then, is somewhere in the middle. Of course, we need to be acquainted with poem, so we must read the poem slowly and deliberately, but when we are reading to obtain information about the poem, we might speed up a bit. But also we might need to return to poem as we are reading about it.

To gain a solid appreciation of a poem, it is useful to first study the poem to decide what we think it is doing; then, if we have the good fortune to be able to read a commentary or analysis, or even a thorough explication, we get an extra opportunity to gain even deeper apprecaition.