If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

Abrams is warning against a utilitarian mode of reading that treats a poem as a container for a detachable “meaning.” To read quickly “to get through” to an abstract paraphrase is to bypass what makes a poem a poem: its texture of language—tone, rhythm, syntax, imagery, and the sequence of felt effects as the lines unfold. The “body” of the poem is its lived experience in time, where sense is made through sound and structure as much as through statement. The quote thus argues that interpretation should arise from attentive engagement with the poem’s verbal particulars, not from extracting a summary as if the poem were a riddle with a single answer.