Loving Poetry with Robert Pinsky’s Singing School

By Caitlin O'Hara
On love, on grief, on every human thing,
Time sprinkles Lethe’s water with his wing.
-Walter Savage Landor, “On Love, on Grief”

Recently while driving, I heard Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky on the radio. He was talking, of course, about poetry and said something that changed the way I had always thought about the subject.  The revelation was an idea so simple that I am almost embarrassed to admit it. It was something along the lines of this: when we look at a painting, we don’t expect of ourselves to understand its literal meaning, or any meaning at all, right away.  No, we en...