When I first started becoming interested in poetry as a kid, part of the appeal was the mystery and difficulty so often associated with it. Like poems were cryptic lockboxes I could hack my way into and uncover some hidden insights other people weren't capable of uncovering. If a poem was too old or too abstract for me to make sense of, I was just too weak for that particular fight and I'd have to come back later.
But of course that's not what poetry is or ever should be. It's not supposed to be a fight between the reader and the poet, with the reader trying to wrestle meaning out of the poet's hands who's trying desperately to keep it secret. Poetry is supposed to be inviting and pleasurable and moving. It should occasionally challenge the reader, sure, but it shouldn't be torturous.
Some things I realized over the years that made poems make a lot more sense to me:
This one is probably obvious, but I didn't realize it for an embarrassingly long time. Don't let line breaks fool you. Just because a new line starts doesn't mean you should pause. Punctuation is more important than line and stanza breaks. When you're reading a poem and there's a new line but no punctuation, just keep going like you would in prose. Don't pause. For example, from Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art":
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
The rhythm of that stanza should be: "The art of losing isn't hard to master. So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster." It's called enjambment and not respecting it makes poems absolutely awful to read.
Slow down. You can't read poetry the way you read prose. If you just quickly read the lines and consume the who what when where why of it all, you'll be missing like 80% of the art of the poem. Poetry is not informational like an article or a blog. Poetry is meditative. It's introspective. Spend 10 minutes, 30 minutes, a whole day reading and contemplating a poem. Recite one line over and over in your head as you fall asleep, then wake up and read the next line. Take this haiku by Takarai Kikaku from the late 1600s. Try spending at least 30 seconds really meditating on each line and see if the extra time is rewarding in any way.
Above the boat,
bellies
of wild geese.
Read out loud. Poetry, at least English poetry, is as concerned with the music of words themselves as it is with meanings and imagery and metaphors. If you can't read out loud at least mouth the words silently and feel the words on your tongue and teeth and lips. Poets care about those things. The texture of food is often as important as its taste or nutritional value. It's the same concept. Try reading this, out loud. See if you can feel an energy, a rhythm, or a music that wouldn't be present if you were silently reading in your mind. From "Thistles" by Ted Hughes:
Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
Thistles spike the summer air
And crackle open under a blue-black pressure.
It's good to learn some rules about meter and form. It's by no means necessary, but it can enhance your appreciation for the art and skill a poet is displaying, the way learning some music theory will increase your appreciation for the technical aspects of music. Learning four meters will go a long way when it comes to reading older English poetry.
Iambic meter. An unstressed syllable followed by a stressed. and ONE and TWO and THREE and FOUR:
A thing of beauty is a joy forever...
Trochaic meter. Stressed followed by unstressed. ONE and TWO and THREE and FOUR:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary...
Anapestic meter. Unstressed unstressed stressed. and-a ONE and-a TWO and-a THREE and-a FOUR:
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams...
Dactylic meter. Stressed unstressed unstressed. ONE and-a TWO and-a THREE and-a FOUR:
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks...
Learning just those four will translate to pretty much every English poem written before 1900. Learning a bit about different forms like ballads, sonnets, villanelles, sestinas etc. will also go a long way. Most modern poets just use free-verse, but I think the classic forms are really interesting and fun.
Don't take poetry so seriously. It's entertainment at the end of the day. Read a poem backwards, turn it into a song or a painting, read the stanzas out of order, rewrite it in your own words. Just dive in and see what you get. I'll leave this Billy Collins poem here to say it better than I ever could, called "Introduction to Poetry":
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.