see 2. first(posted 9197 days ago)1.
I would suggest , at first, giving the poem an ignorant first vocally loud reading ; kind of see what musicality you can find in an innocent sense. Then, if you cannot appreciate it for the breath and musicality & you want to make sense and give it content, I would write the thing out in prose, ( that is to say,'take it out of the artistic line length and put it in a paragraph form, as it is we, as humans , are more used to reading a paragraph and sentence as opposed to reading chopped iambic lines... { I find Yeats a good one to practice this with} It is hard for us to carry over a thought from chopped line to chopped musical line : we register paragraphs more clearly, we've been taught to read this way, our liberal education etc. ( keep in mind, generally speaking, most good poetry is written with correct grammar up until the twentieth century)... This , more or less, prose writing of a poem allows us to more accurately observe the poems "content", or "story" of images, we can connect things more smoothly and make a "text" analysis, and that is ,mind you, far different, in my opinion, than an aesthetic analysis. Sometimes you may need help in this textual analysis as it is most probable that you are living at a different time than that of the poem's origin. The prose writing of the poem helps it flow more smoothly, but it does not provide historical context of the poem and this means :::: RESEARCH in the historical sense. Find out when the poem was written, where it was written and do some research so as to put it in the context it was meant to be in (it also helps to use an oxford dictionary because it provides the different meanings of the same word as the words meaning is twisted through history... Look at the word aweful.... Used to mean beautiful and now look at it...)
* O.K. so now you've written it in prose and you've done the research and you have some understanding of the content. Understanding the content helps you understand the tone etc, & emotion, and understanding the tone helps you understand the line length and will help you give it a good , "aloud" reading . This reading should allow you to escape your day to day routine thinking & breathing for a little while .
Overall : I think thats the worth of poetry.
2. For 20th century work, generally speaking, throw all the above out the door. Read 19th century men: Wordsworth and his preface. Read Whitman. 20th century work is a strange hermetic type of poetry (but, mind you ,I'm no scholar) . We, the readers, cannot really "know" the content of the hermetic poet, but we can share in his experience and thought. Sometimes I'll read for content and go "what the hell is this shmuck whining about?" . & then I'll read it aloud & that makes all the difference.
Somewhere along the line ,probably, well, ok, at Wordsworth, the line length changed. Line kinda became "breath". Reading aloud for this is important because the reader shares the poet's breath and hence ( I think Hass says something like this} shares the poets anatomy and shares what fills his body at a certain moment. This moment, when you read the poem aloud, is special in that the poem becomes nobodies:
the poet gives up his breath. you ,somewhat, give up your body & the poem becomes something communal like a dead diana who belonged to the whole world in the end.
This kind of poem is a communal poem, something that everyone, artist and reader alike, surrenders themselves to for various reasons. Things don't always make sense during what Wordsworth would call an "excited state" when a poem is written, but it can be understood in some emotional language that transcends words. Do thoughts, when having sex, make sense ?
Hardly.
But the breath, if translated through rythym and line length, can help the experience be shared and maybe, somewhat, understood.
* Well.
Just some dumb thoughts for you from some guy in korea. ( Devices and etc. were not addressed. I answered the question wrong).