They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture
Pleased that the irrational is rational.
Money is a kind of poetry.

(Wallace Stevens)

It may be a question not so much of what poetry we read but of how we read it. I confess myself to be a snail-pace reader – a Marianne Moore snail, that is – and rereader, above all a rereader. And the problem with being a university teacher of poetry is that you are obliged to appear to believe, for professional purposes, that poetry is explicable. ‘Read it? I haven’t even lectured on it!’ (with apologies to Stephen Knight). Yet the context in which one reads a poem may determine one’s sense of it.