@Corpsey read this poem now
I tried (not very hard) yesterday when I was hungover and it merely confused and therefore bored me. For me, there isn't anything motivating me to read it. Perhaps others understand it quicker, or they see the confusion itself as intriguing?
For the last week or so, for whatever reason, I've been trying to read Auden and wondering what's making me try when I find the poems so incomprehensible and unenlightening – is it that I want to feel clever? Or is it that I have read about how important/great Auden is and therefore think that if I try hard enough the scales will fall from my eyes?
In either case it's against my natural instincts when I first read one of these confusing poems – I don't get anything out of it that first time, so unless I had been told by someone else that it's important to read it, I wouldn't bother. The satisfaction of poetry for me (such as it is) comes from rhythm and rhyme but also observations about life that I recognise as being truthful and respond to emotionally.
I shouldn't be
anti difficulty, but I wonder what the value of it is. Stuff like you cannot express the complexity of reality or the imagination without being difficult.
Perhaps (and I've probably expressed this before on here many times) I'm just not that interested in
language.
Wondering, too, why it is that some writers (writers who I often don't particularly want to like) compel me to read them, while others (who I feel I 'should' like) bore me, never hook me, are a chore.