I read a short article by the neglected English poet Nicholas Moore that said that poetry isn't neccessarily about communication, but it about what he refers to as indication.
By which I think he meant that the poem doesn't neccessarily communicate the whole of an idea or an experience, but that it points us toward ideas and experiences that we might find interesting/moving and that we can then explore for ourselves.
In that sense, I think we can appreciate some poems before we understand them: because, although we don't completely "get" them, they leave us with something to think about or to feel; we take something away from them because they open up new spaces in our heads. That was, for instance, my experience with Eliot, with Frank O'Hara and Ashbery.
I get it less and less from poems I can paraphrase in a few sentences.
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Steve Waling
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