Every time I try to read poetry I completely fail to comprehend anything. The metaphors always fly over my head, its themes are always too obfuscated for me and I therefore never understand what a poem is trying to say.
I have always struggled to understand things when they are not told to me literally, but poetry is something so universally present across all human civilizations that I just feel like a fucking idiot every time I read a poem I don’t understand and then watch someone explain it. It’s like I’m missing out on something beautiful that other people understand but not me, and I find that frustrating.
The only times I understand poetry is when its description of the visuals is about something I actively recognize, like the Crimean War in Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S93lvQ4Ukg8&pp=0gcJCfwAo7VqN5tD

Get sixty percent drunk and light up a cigarette and try again

Get picrel. It’s written by a poet and poetry professor but assumes you have zero poetry knowledge. Read the poem and then try to analyse it yourself and then compare with the author’s. You’ll get better at it as the book goes on

I read the Burton Raffel book on how to read a poem. Turns out I just like stuff like pic related and not the gay shit they had us read in school. I have no idea what the last line means does anyone know?

>>24543434
Last line is a shit pun with no dimension

>>24543459
What does it mean?

one of many possible answers