Quote:
Originally posted by Roger Slater:
I agree with what Rhina says about approaching all poems with suspicion, and I'm sure I do that all the time. But I seem to remember reading an exhortation by Roethke that readers should initially approach all poems with great respect and faith in the poet.
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This is a fascinating topic that deserves its own discussion. There's some kind of initial inertia against a poem, of course. Reading isn't a natural reaction, but something we have to be trained to do, and so there's a sense in which the sheer physical act of reading a poem presents a burden that the poem has to be good enough to overcome.
But for anyone who likes reading poetry, this is a pretty low bar for a poem to have to clear. I've always thought that Coleridge's description of the willing suspension of disbelief we bring to stories meant something like the opposite of suspicion. Every story starts with the reader's good will--we
will to suspend disbelief--and only a bad or badly told story breaks that mood.
Is there an equivalent for poems? Perhaps that's what Roethke means.
[This message has been edited by Joseph Bottum (edited August 15, 2003).]