For many of our students, poetry is dead because, ironically, they fail to see it as a body. This struggle to discover meaning becomes acute with that distinctly modern poetry created by Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and their contemporaries and heirs. Perhaps four out of every five of our students exhibit this Right-Answer attitude toward poetry. These two opposed attitudes are based on the same misconception about poetry about art in general. In fact, the opposite is true.
All art has a physical body.
Only then can it begin to mean anything to us. If physical apprehension is vivid enough, it may even eliminate a need for intellectual comprehension. Nearly twenty years ago, after half a dozen years of trying and largely failing, to explain The Waste Land to my various American literature classes, I quit teaching the poem, convinced that it was too hard for them to learn and for me to teach. If it were a song, instead of trying to explain it, we would make a music video of it. Instead of failing to comprehend it, they would succeed in apprehending it.