Faced with a poem, I often feel like I do not understand it and thus cannot enjoy it fully. Are there ways to 'understand' poetry more fully?

Every student of literature will come up against textual difficulty at some point in their studies, particularly when faced with notoriously difficult poets such as T.S Eliot or Ezra Pound. The experience of difficulty can be unpleasant and impair both the pleasure of reading and clarity of commentary. It can be felt as a barrier separating one from the text; Leonard Diepeveen, author of The Difficulties of Modernism, describes is as 'the experience of having one’s desires for comprehension blocked'. 'Difficulty' experienced in such a way can damage the student's confidence, make him or her think that there is something that they are 'missing out' on, that they are unqualified to comment or analyse the poem itself. The experience of textual 'difficulty' is thus central to the study of literature. Difficulty can crop up in many forms: some include archaic vocabulary or style (particularly obvious in Middle or Old English), or allusions that the reader may not grasp (as, famously, in the case of The Waste Land). More radically, textual difficulty occurs in texts that divert from traditional styles (such as Virginia Woolf's stream of consciousness technique in To the Lighthouse), or texts whose elements lack causal or logical connections. In all these cases, the reader experiences difficulty in the form of 'not knowing'. In some of these cases difficulty can be searched out and 'solved'; unknown vocabulary can be looked up in a dictionary, difficult allusions can be retrieved with the help of notes or annotations. But my tutoring style is centred on shifting the student's conception of difficulty from a 'problem' that requires solving to an intrinsic part of the experience of reading. A sensation of uncertainty, of 'not knowing' is central to the experience of reading a text such as The Waste Land, which explores the fragmentation and disintegration of post-World War I society. As such, the experience of 'difficulty' as 'unpleasant' is founded on erroneous mentality in which there is one meaning which the author has in mind and the reader doesn’t, in which the poem can be coaxed into yielding a single, unitary meaning. And while 'difficulty' no doubt exists and remains a central part of the debate about Modernist authors (was Modernist difficulty inclusive or exclusive, for example?), the realisation that there is no 'ideal' reader who is perfectly set to enjoy and understand a poem such as The Waste Land can prove reassuring and beneficial to the student. It can prevent him or her from 'fearing' and avoiding difficul texts, encourage a reading of poetry recognises the importance of audial rather than logical meaning (how the words sound rather than what they mean), and promote greater active participation in the act of reading.