The author suggests that knowing poetry's rules, and the history of how poets have broken those rules, can help people "get" poetry. I'm skeptical that cerebral understanding alone can help much. On the rare occasion that I've "gotten" a poem, it never happened through reason. If I tried analyzing while reading it I don't think the getting could have happened at all.
As stated I don't get many poems, but I feel that cultivating the ability to get them probably has something to do with: 1) awareness of your own emotional state in the present moment; it's the needed reference point to connect with the poet's state at time of writing 2) awareness of your accumulated life experience -- it's the material you reference to make sense of the poem 3) sensitivity to the sounds & rhythms of words 4) a broad perspective on life that includes awareness of its ultimate frame -- death; Spanish poet Lorca wrote about a creative force called 'duende' that arises from experience of the darker side of life; I think such experience may also give rise to a receptiveness to and appreciation of the more significant things conveyed in poetry and other arts 5) desire and ability to connect content of a poem to other things, be they other poems, history, the poet's personal history or whatever; poems are not islands, they have contexts, and your moment of reading one also has a context consisting of your personal intellectual history and current mental and emotional state, among other things.
As stated I don't get many poems, but I feel that cultivating the ability to get them probably has something to do with: 1) awareness of your own emotional state in the present moment; it's the needed reference point to connect with the poet's state at time of writing 2) awareness of your accumulated life experience -- it's the material you reference to make sense of the poem 3) sensitivity to the sounds & rhythms of words 4) a broad perspective on life that includes awareness of its ultimate frame -- death; Spanish poet Lorca wrote about a creative force called 'duende' that arises from experience of the darker side of life; I think such experience may also give rise to a receptiveness to and appreciation of the more significant things conveyed in poetry and other arts 5) desire and ability to connect content of a poem to other things, be they other poems, history, the poet's personal history or whatever; poems are not islands, they have contexts, and your moment of reading one also has a context consisting of your personal intellectual history and current mental and emotional state, among other things.