Reddit mentions of The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry

Forgive me for saying this, but many of you are giving this person the wrong kind of advice. He/She is asking for tools for understanding literature, and you're suggesting that he/she just read good books.

If someone asked your advice about how to rebuild a car engine, would you suggest that what they needed to do was learn to love driving a BMW?

Think about it like sports -- the more you understand about the game, the more you can see, and the greater your "critical appreciation" of the game becomes. This is eloquently expressed in Foster's own Infinite Jest, which contains rather long asides about the intricacies of tennis. I still dislike tennis, but I've gained a greater critical appreciation for the game since reading that book.

There are a number of opinions about the proper methodology for producing accounts of "what a piece of lit means," and professional literary scholars make a living arguing over which methodology is best. I would suggest starting with the "close reading" method espoused by The New Criticism and then proceeding forward. John Crowe Ransom's "Criticism, Inc" is a kind of manifesto of the movement. Then you should probably look into Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn which is a collection of essays. These lay out a clear methodological foundation for what it means to say you are interpreting a piece of literature. Without understanding what you are doing when you are conducting literary analysis, you're building a house on quicksand. It's like trying to do science without the scientific method.

That being said, very few people actually refer to what they're doing as "New Criticism," although many people still utilize the "close reading" skills they picked up there. Once you plow through those there are literally dozens of different methods you can choose from, all requiring more sophisticated (i.e. difficult, time-consuming) modes of analysis. I suggest starting there and then coming back.