I would sometimes ask students on an intro to lit final (partly as an excuse to give "bonus" points; mostly for my own curiosity) to pick any poem we read that they particularly liked and say briefly why. One student once chose D. Rossetti's "The Woodspurge" because "my father had died a few weeks before we read it, and I knew exactly what he [Rossetti] felt." That seems to me a very good reason to read and like a poem.
David Mason posted the anecdotal context for TRW:
"Dr. Williams's poem reportedly contains a personal experience: he was gazing from the window of the house where one of his patients, a small girl, lay suspended between life and death..." Assuming some truth in that, it explains much about how the poem captures a psychological [if not necessarily logical] reality in artistic (formal) terms.
Whether or not autobiographical or other knowledge can or should be brought to bear when judging a poem is a whole new critical arena, but it can sometimes explain a lot. Another example [also from the Kennedy/Gioia text]:
Sir, say no more,
Within me 'tis as if
The green and climbing eyesight of a cat
Crawled near my mind's poor birds.
This, by Trumbull Stickney, can be seen as simply a more-or-less interesting exercise in image/simile, but probably comes to mean more if one knows that Stickney was suffering from brain cancer. Does that knowledge make it a (better) poem? Maybe that's not the question to ask--or at least not the only one.
Cheers,
Jan
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