Peanut Butter and Shelley

"But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought" Percy Blythe Shelley

Well after finally getting around to reading some of Shelley, all the previous comments pertaining to the reading certainly hold true. Shelley is rich with knowledge on poetry and I personally find his argument pretty damn compelling. I say this because for the most part, I can't stand poetry. I, for the most part, dislike all poetry units of any english class I ever participated in. I beleive however, my stubborness played more into my dislike of poetry and beacuse most teachers try to force meaning upon me as if its glaringly apparent and I'm some blind and deaf fool. After reading Frye a bit and realizing, "the literal meaning of the poem is the poem," Shelley's comment on the "thousand unapprehended combinations of thought" evoked by poetry acted like a nice dose of oxycotin on the pain created by a majority of my past poetry experience. After reading a bit of Shelley, I've decided to take a bit less of a depressed approach to poetry. It seems that reflecting upon a poem creates the experience rather than dicovering some profound meaning. Reading a poem with the singular purpose of deriving meaning ruins the poem. Reading a poem for the sake of reading. This method almost lends itself to the idea of the return to innoncence yet because we are not innocent some form of understanding will be evoked by the innocent reading. Before, I read poetry with a gigantic knot in my brain which was the cause of infinite frustration. Thanks to the fine Swedish Massage given to me by Shelley, the knot, for the most part, worked itself. Poetry will probably continue to cause problems in my study of Literature but now I can save myself a bit of headache and maybe even grow to appreciate the dreaded poetry unit.