Literature teachers try, somewhat haphazardly, to expose students to material that they aren't really ready for. There's no one correct route that will connect with all students. Some will get it immediately; others will connect years later; others will never find it resonates with them at all.

I think the most common approaches aren't very effective. They're taught to treat a poem as a puzzle to be decrypted, as if the poet could have spoken more plainly but chose not to. You're taught to look for "symbolism", because a one-to-one matching of symbols to the real world is easy to talk about. But it didn't help me connect with anything, and I suspect for many others.

A better approach, at least for me, is to take a piece that already connects and then examine why it works. You already know, for example, that popular song lyrics are easy to memorize. Why? What is the structure they're using, and how does that pattern build up more than the same concept expressed in different words? Why did you like Film X and hate Film Y, even when they're superficially similar?

There's no right answer, and that's hard to teach. Especially to students like me, who think of school as "Science and a bunch of classes for students not smart enough to take science." (I suspect that rings bells for many.) I eventually learned that I enjoyed things that were created by those "not smart enough for science", and became interested in how those things worked -- even though there's still no right answer.

I just now have a way to talk about it, lessons that my English teachers tried and failed to get to me. I believe they could have done it better, though what would have worked for me would have failed other people differently.