Do not be cross with poetry

[RiverNotch]

What's missing here (apart from half the posters and half the posts) is the fact that reading comprehension goes completely out the window when emotion is involved. If the reader is upset, others can APPEAR dense, malicious, delusional, defiant...anything really. I'm saying this just as much for myself as anyone else.

I guess different people respond differently. For me, reading comprehension does not go out the window when emotions are involved. If anything it makes me read more carefully, and reread and think about how what has sparked me can be interpreted. It makes me slower to respond while I try to figure out why something has gotten to me.

So speak for yourself.  

But wouldn't you fail to respond to something you can't comprehend, except in feeling either awed or baffled at the thing? Which is, in itself, a form of comprehension, albeit of the fact that the thing exists and is incomprehensible, rather than of the thing itself -----
ie, I'm supposing comprehension happens at levels. Reading comprehension as a whole can't go out the window when emotions are involved, unless the person chooses to just take in the feels and stop reading completely (which is, I dunno, kinda meh) -- it just takes either a step back or a step forward, depending on how American one is. And this isn't really semantic, I think -- the moment reading comprehension reaches the level wherein the reader comprehends a work as something solely awe-inspiring/baffling, or as something that gave (emphasis on the tense) a certain emotional hit and nothing more, is the moment a reader has basically stopped reading, which is I think the moment when the piece itself doesn't matter anymore.