Some words on poetry analysis

Like I said in the last post, I had to explain recently the purpose of citations, reading response papers, things like that.  Here is my explanation of the basic reasons for analyzing poetry:

The analysis of poetry isn't something you learn in order to replace reading, or even to become a better reader. You don't need analysis to read a poem and enjoy it. But analysis is a tool that opens up a shortcut to the insights you typically get after you've read a poem a trillion times. When you know it by heart. When you've memorized it. And in that sense, it's extremely useful to know, and is almost required as a skill if you want to make any truly scholarly remarks about a piece of writing like a poem, because it is only based on that intimate knowledge that anything of that critical complexity can be genuinely thought valid. But it also heightens your appreciation of a poem in general, just like reading something over and over and knowing it inside and out does. So it provides the foundation for everything involved in talking in a sophisticated manner about poems, at the same time as it capitalizes on the strengths you already have as someone who is literate and knows how to read. It is a device that can turn literacy into critical thinking.