Robert:
I think I agree that a work has to "work" in various ways before its appeal can be more than superficial. But maybe we need to ponder what we mean by "understanding." (Yes, I know that anyone who questions the meaning of a commonly used word is inviting a firestorm, but I believethose are the words we MUST question, not for obfuscation but for clarity, or at least to reveal the source of the obscurity.) Schools work on the assumption that to understand something is to be able to paraphrase it to someone else's satisfaction (usually someone in authority); following from that is our own panicky feeling when we can't confidently paraprhase it -- "Oh, Lord! What if this is on the midterm!" Those habits of thought are deeply ingrained.
I don't question that paraphrase is a useful excercise. But there may well be other kinds of understanding, maybe a sense of a work's cohesion or tone, for example.
Another issue: We have various reasons for not understanding something, and sometimes we can sense which is the cause. At the simplest level, maybe I don't know what some of the words mean (a recent poem of mine mentioned a springtooth, and my wife, with no rural background, was baffled). Worse yet, maybe I think I know what some of the words mean but I'm wrong (a friend who teaches economics gave a lecture on the flow of goods, and afterwards a student asked what happened if some of the stuff flowing was bad -- No, I'm not making this up). Or the syntax is somehow confusing us. Or the ideas themselves are so new that we can't wrap our brains around them. And then of course there can be combinations of problems. If the poem offers us enough in other ways, if it's tempting enough, so to speak, then maybe we'll be willing first to analyze our own lack of understanding and, second, to remedy it. That has been my experiency, anyway.
Richard
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