If in reading the poem you get distracted by an irritable need to come up with a consistent, coherent set of ideas that the speaker has in his feelings about the urn, an overall message about the urn, or silence, or time, or mortality, instead of thinking about the statements of the poem as a series of deeply felt, shifting, even contradictory thoughts, you will miss what is truly great about the experience of reading it. Maybe poems are not to be read for their great answers, but for their great, more often than not unanswerable, questions.

Unlike every other use of language, poems are where contradictions and possibilities of the material of our meaning-making system are not an unfortunate and troubling ghost in the machine: they are brought forth to be celebrated. The role of the poem is to bring out all the aspects of language: its provisionality, uncertainty, slippage, as well as its miraculous ability to communicate, to mean. Consistency, logic, the pleasurable obligations of plot and setting and characters . . . those are conveniences for the poet, to be adopted or discarded at will. What are the marks of a failed language act everywhere else—not following through on what you have started to say, jumping around and making unjustified connections, saying what is beautiful and exciting rather than what is strictly necessary, and so on—are, if not the mark of, at least the beginnings of poetry.