Savor a poem, don't count its calories

I was talking to my mom earlier today, and was venting my problems with the sanitized and over-analytical way that some people treat poetry. This is a spiel I go into periodically, since being an English major, I sometimes run into this kind of person at school, and they really get under my skin by taking the joy out of just reading a poem. It's not that I don't enjoy analyzing and thinking about the poems I read, I just see a poem as an art form to be enjoyed, not a lab animal to be dissected (it's just poetry, not science, for Pete's sake).

Anyways, my wise mother put this into what I thought was a very accurate analogy. She compared reading a poem to eating a gourmet meal - if you like the taste of the food, you wonder "Hm, what's in this stuff? What makes it taste so good?". The critics - the kind of students I hate to listen to in my English classes - are like nutritionists. As my mom put it, they want to know how many calories are in each part of the food, what the fat content is, and so on and so forth. They don't seem to like the flavor of the poem itself so much as they like analyzing simply for the sake of analyzing. And because of this, they can sometimes even look down on poems that are simple and accessible, with a royal attitude of "Those are the poems that the commoners read".
That's all. I just wanted to share the analogy.