Strictly speaking, it seems absurd to pretend to appreciate something which you don't understand, unless a very limited definition of "appreciate" is applied. But I think it is possible to have a legitimate aesthetic appreciation of poetry without being able to explicate its meaning, as would be the case with Empson enjoying but "not having a clue about" Dylan Thomas. There is indeed a certain irony in the fact the Empson, one of the arch-angels of New Critical close reading, would express this, but the very fact that he had studied the whole matter of explicable meaning so exhaustively (and, no doubt, with extraordinary intelligence) adds weight to his testimony.
So how can you appreciate something without being able to say what it means? This would entail a kind of tacit, non-explicit understanding. This partly involves the non-intellectual aspects graywyvern refers to, but intellectual aspects too.
One of the hallmarks of modernist poetry is that it tends to resist interpretation. "It must be difficult," I think Harold Bloom says somewhere (but he also endorses Wallace Stevens: "It must give pleasure.") And it is no coincidence that the impulse to elude interpretation coincided, historically, with the monstrous growth of the critical faculty that more or less set out to conquer poetry & reduce it to explicable meanings.
I've been looking at Hart Crane a little bit recently. He is an incredibly difficult poet, but if you stay with him, he begins to make a different kind of sense. There is a difference between "reading" a poem, in the sense of assimilating it to yourself, and "living with" a poem, in the sense of accepting it on its own terms and being patient with it. We tend to consume poetry in the fast-food mode, especially in the extremely time-sensitive environment of the internet. Gulp it down (thoughtfully, of course, but quickly), & report any reactions. This does not encourage subtle poetry.
Hart Crane has some interesting theoretical remarks on these matters too. here's a sentence I marked:
"it is as though the poem gave the reader as he left it a single, new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle in the reader's consciousness henceforward."
I like this as a formula for the potential (& valuable) tacit, inexplicable, meaning of a poem.
But, as a practical matter, it's true that I don't like stuff I can't understand. Unless something convinces me somehow that the writer knows what he or she is doing. Then, maybe, give it room and let it work, as best it can.
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