Poetry as Spiritual Practice | Beyond "Analysis"

Someone recently asked me in the YouTube comments of one of my recent videos, what's the difference between studying literature and reading it for pleasure? And of course, there is a great difference. Uh, in the academy and in school, you'll learn how to dissect poetry, how to analyze it, how to understand the cultural context, which is very important. This is the study of poetry.

And then the the pleasure or the enjoyment of it involves a very imaginative um [clears throat] encounter with the poem. And I've developed a five-stage uh series of questions that I believe that you can take with you into your own reading to integrate these two sides because a lot of what I do here on YouTube and on is about integrating both the the very important academic side of analyzing poetry but also facilitating the kinds of encounter that I think are actually prerequisite and important to any kind of analysis. In fact, if you were going to have one without the other, it's much more important uh to have the imaginative and personal encounter with poetry rather than a very abstract and intellectual um analytical perspective. In fact, um the analytical perspective is is really dangerous if you don't have the other.

Uh Walter Jackson Bait had a great line in his uh book, The Achievement of Samuel Johnson. I often refer to it. And uh he says this, this is on page 130. This is page 230.

To pick one's way through the large chaotic body of man's literature, evaluating and getting anything out of it, involves first of all the use of the same qualities of mind needed to extract any point or meaning out of life itself. You see, I've just read this um to shreds here. Uh I love uh Walter Jackson Bait. He's one of the many critics that I really really enjoy enjoy reading.

But he's basically saying that the same qualities of mind that you're exercising when reading poetry help us to find meaning and beauty in our own lives. And I think that's the great importance of close reading. That's what this channel and everything I I do professionally is all about helping people do that. And I think poetry is a great place of encounter.

So I want to tell you about this method I developed uh that's going to help integrate ...