‘to half understand a poem’

Three thoughts on understanding poems, or on not understanding them, where understanding may not be the point, or not understanding may be beside the point.

Kayo Chingonyi: ’teachers are rarely encouraged to say ”you might not get this because there might not be anything to get but you still might find it interesting”. I think the interpretation of meaning is only a small part of experiencing a poem……’

Caroline Bird ( a comment in the Forward Prize book 2021): ’I’m fascinated with the idea that poetry is about inserting a mystery into the reader’s life not clarifying one, that by the end of a poem you should know less than you did when you started, that a poem is a kind of amnesia injection that makes the immediate world strange again.’

G.K.Chesterton ( from his 1903 book about Robert Browning):
‘..a kind of fascination, a strictly artistic fascination, which arises from a matter being hinted at in such a way as to leave a certain tormenting uncertainty even at the end. It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world……..There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.’

Discuss.