During the week, we were allowed to choose between a poem that was accessible and one that had more obscure language for analysis in a seminar. Reading both poems got me thinking about whether "accessible" poems were easier to analyze than inaccessible ones. At first, this question seemed obvious and not debatable, but one of the most important things that I believe we learn by writing essays is the skill of looking beyond the obvious, and drawing deeper conclusions and meanings. For the purpose of this blog post, and by that I mean framing the issue so that I can actually write about it at length with any kind of ambiguity and complexity whatsoever, I will define accessible as language containing vocabulary that the average person would be expected to understand as individual words. Note that this definition doesn't cover underlying meaning because if I defined accessibility as simplicity of a piece's overall meaning, then we wouldn't have much of a blog post because I would be arguing that a piece with simple meaning is harder to analyze than one with a complex meaning, which is absurd.
I bet you spent an embarrassingly long time trying to understand this simple sentence
In a timed writing context, accessible language may confer an advantage over language that contains obscure or antiquated vocabulary because the words can be processed faster and the vocabulary is one less stumbling block that could impede understanding of a work's meaning. For example, people who don't know the meaning of the word "twain" may assume that it is a reference to the author Mark Twain and thus absorb either nothing, or a misinterpretation from a sentence, while a sentence with simple vocabulary doesn't have that problem because the reader always absorbs some correct meaning out of it, however minimal. Since complex language often refers to highly specific concepts, the risk for misinterpretation grows because we generally learn words contextually instead of consciously memorizing the definitions of every difficult word we come across.
However, that specificity of complexity can also be negative in the sense that it handicaps possible interpretations. If a poem uses a specific term that only works in one or a few interpretations, it's much harder to impress a reader when your interpretation echoes dozens or possibly hundreds of similar ones that were graded before yours. Simple and ambiguous language may give the writer more latitude in how to interpret and respond to the speaker's words in order to come up with an "innovative" interpretation that might impress instructors or readers. If you have a good vocabulary, interpreting poems with complex and difficult vocabulary may be advantageous because consciously or not, the instructor or reader's grading may be more lenient if the poem is inherently more difficult. This is especially valid on AP tests, which are graded on a curve.
Thus, it's difficult to really consider whether accessible poems are more difficult than inaccessible ones, due to the subjective definition of accessibility, as well as random factors outside of our control, such as whether our vocabularies include the particular "inaccessible" words that would show up on a given poem, or the amount of sympathy the AP reader has for you because you had to write an essay on an inaccessible poem. According to this definition of accessibility though, there is no clear "winner" in difficulty whether a poem is accessible or inaccessible.
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