You can teach and test recognition of all of those components, I agree, but none of it has anything to do with whether or not the poem is achieving anything. I

You can teach and test recognition of all of those components, I agree, but none of it has anything to do with whether or not the poem is achieving anything. I am not saying that there is no context within which analysis has meaning, but that sort of component analysis I think is a misapplication of a certain kind of thinking to a medium that does not benefit at all from it. If we knew the components of good poems we could actually produce them with some consistency. We can't. So to teach it that way is only to turn poetry into a cypher for a different activity altogether. I guess thats fine, those skills may be needed for other areas of life and are worth developing, but it doesn't seem like learning about the function or creation of art, so in turn seems like a takeover of the field for the sake of something else entirely. I dunno, maybe its all good, but it seems like something potentially valuable and encouraging is being sacrificed for the sake of analysis.