Poetry 101 (2015-06-30)
I suspect yet another reason so few people read poetry now is that they think of it is an academic subject to be mastered and then forgotten because irrelevant to life outside of school. This is not surprising given that “Poetry” is ‘taught’ in schools—like a course in algebra.
They don’t offer a course in listening to popular music. You don’t need such a course to listen to it. You don’t need a course in poetry to read it.
How much you ‘understand' it will depend on how much you have learned to understand language itself. This will change with experience—and deliberate attention and effort.
