From a distance I have always found Bruce Springsteen interesting, especially in his current incarnation as a committed populist straddling the line between his own politics and those of his many MAGA fans. But his set-to last spring with President Trump, who called him “overrated” and “not a talented guy,” made me realize how very little of Springsteen’s music I have ever really engaged. I must come clean and say that I just never got it.

That fact came up in conversation the other day with a Springsteen fan, a fellow member of the Catskills bungalow colony I visit every year. He gave me a song list, and I sat down to listen.

And I mean really listen: My mantra is that you have to give something seven tries to really get it. That’s tough in the thick of a workweek, but I’m on vacation, so I made time for all of it: “Rosalita,” “Prove It All Night,” “Brilliant Disguise,” “The River,” “Spirit in the Night,” “The Promised Land,” “Backstreets,” “Badlands,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “The Rising,” “New York City Serenade” and the album “Born to Run.”

As engrossed as I was, I kept having to remind myself to listen to the music. What grabbed my ear was the lyrics. That had been my mistake all these years — waiting for these songs to be, primarily, songs, as if they were Schubert lieder. For me, Springsteen’s work is poetry with musical accompaniment. Realizing that helped me understand something important about him, but something important about America, too.

There were certainly some musical moments that struck me. Clarence Clemons’s justly famous saxophone solo on “Jungleland,” with its gospel-inflected wail, is a marvel. It starts suddenly, about four minutes in, with a soaring, authoritative clarion call that brings us abruptly from C major to an unexpected E flat, a new world. It feels like when the film “The Wizard of Oz” goes into color.

But moments like that were the exception. Even about “Jungleland,” the music blogger Michael Miller offers the praise that it’s “nothing less than pure rock and roll poetry” (italics mine).