Here are seven propositions and a question taken from Harold Bloom's The Art of Reading Poetry. I offer them without elaboration (neither mine nor Bloom's) for you to consider and make your own judgments about each one.
If you'd like to read some poems and compare how your responses to these propositions and the question fit for actual poems, you could read some at the following links (or have them read to you via the third link):
Emily Dickinson's poems
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poems
www.favoritepoem.org
www.poemhunter.com
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Poetry essentially is figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative.
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Language, to a considerable extent, is concealed figuration: ironies and synechdoches, metonymies and metaphors that we recognise only when our awareness increases.
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Greatness in poetry depends upon splendor of figurative language and on cognitive power, or what Emerson termed "meter-making argument" (an intellectual exploration, with rhythm).
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The art of reading poetry begins with mastering allusiveness in particular poems, from the simple to the very complex.
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Allusion is only one strand in the relationship between later and earlier poems.
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What makes one poem better than another?
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Loftiness is a quality that emanates from the realm of aspiration, from what Wordsworth called a sense of something evermore about to be.
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Very good, even great, poetry need not be overly difficult.
