Gillian

I personally don't have to "understand" a poem to enjoy it.  It's not a
comprehension exercise to me... and I am willing to return again and
again to poems, if they do whatever that thing is that excites me in
poetry.  Moreover, the demand that the "meaning" of poetry be plainly to
hand whenever one likes is something which bothers me profoundly: it's
missing something important.

I have to agree with Robert Frost.  There are brilliant "obscure" poems
as well as bad ones, and very bad poems that pretend to plain language.
Comprehensibility, to me anyway, is no indicator of quality either way.

There are poets who determine the resistance of their language in order
to subvert various ideas of poetry as commodity; in other words, their
obscurity is a thought-out philosophical or political position.  I can
respect their reasons, even if I'm not one of them.

Maybe I think arguments about obscurity v. communicability miss the
point, that poetry veers in other directions entirely.

But here's a better defender of poetry than I:  Paul Valery.

"Ordinary spoken language is a practical tool.  It is constantly
resolving immediate problems.  Its task is fulfilled when each sentence
has been completely abolished, annulled, and replaced by the meaning.
Comprehension is its end.  But on the other hand poetic usage is
dominated by  personal conditions, by a conscious, continuous and
sustained musical feeling.

Here language is no longer a transitive act, an expedient.  On the
contrary, it has its own value, which must remain intact in spite of the
operations of the intellect on the given propositions.  Poetic language
must preserve itself, through itself, and remain the same, not to be
altered by the act of intelligence that finds or gives it a meaning."

>From The Art of Poetry, Paul Valery

That is, according to Valery, a poem is made of language, but is not a
use of it.

And Paz says poetry is an eroticism of language precisely because, as the
eroticism of sexuality places reproduction in brackets, the eroticism of
poetry places communication in brackets, in order to find other ways to
play and to be.

Best

Alison











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