Quote:
Originally Posted by JD Gumby
Doesn't mean it's good or beneficial activity. Just means that their brains need to spend more time translating rather than actually absorbing (or, gods forbid, *enjoying*!) what's being read.
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Questionable assumptions to make about the nature of reading:
1. That, if the text is rich and intricate, the brain is necessarily "spending time translating rather than absorbing" it (the way one "translates" rather than "absorbs" the detail of an intricate painting?).
2. That savoring the intricacies and elisions in such a text has nothing to do with enjoyment.
Dense poetry is like a rich dessert for many readers.
If it isn't for you, that's fine. But why dismiss all poetry which you, personally, don't like to read as unstimulating and unenjoyable for everyone else?
Part of the allure of becoming a starving poet is to feel more alive, more conscious in the process of writing, and to share that heightened sense of awareness through language. Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins weren't in it for the money because the act of writing itself was what engaged them. Their sort of writing didn't have an audience in those days, but that doesn't mean their poetry is pointlessly difficult or pretentious.