Poetic Musings

Today, in the midst of putting together the reading packet for my course this fall, I began to seriously think about what it means to teach poetry - specifically, what it means to teach poetry to an introductory class.
My students are freshmen and a sophomore - essentially without exposure to the kind of difficult poetry I will be asking them to read - and I have set for myself the goal of not only making them read it, but of trying to get them to take something meaningful away from it. I want to somehow impart my love of complex poetry to them - at least enough so that the experience of reading T.S. Eliot, H.D., Yeats, Wandor, Milton, and Tennyson is not painful.
So these are my thoughts.

Teaching poetry is essentially the art of making the connections between the obscurity on the page - especially with something like "The Waste Land" - and the things that have meaning in a more quotidian context. What this means, for me anyway, is that I have to make the link between contemporary context - literary, mythic, and even something as basic as life - and these mysterious works of literature that, to most freshmen, have no real basis in the external world.
To so many students, the only type of writing that has bearing on reality is journalism - and occasionally biography - though they're often jaded enough to recognize the fictionalisation of much of that. They have trouble - or at least are resistant to - connecting the world within the text to the world in which they live. Eliot's shanti, shanti, shanti means nothing to them because they don't have the context nor, once given the history, do they have a way to relate that context to something meaningful.
My goal - as a teacher, but more specifically with my course - is to get them to apply the same basic interpretive path (religious myth) across "classic" and contemporary works, and perhaps, by doing so, to get them to realize that older, "harder" works (Milton, Eliot, Tennyson), are, in fact, not so different from contemporary poetry and (even) contemporary science fiction (we're reading Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett).
What I want to be able to do in this class is to teach my students, god forbid, how to think. Yes, I'll be teaching them writing, interpretation, and close reading skills, but if they can think, and I mean really think, by the time they leave my classroom, I will consider myself successful.
I just hope it works.