Knausgaard and poetry (and the significance of names in KOK and Proust)

Readers of My Struggle may remember that at the outset of Book 5 (I think) Karl Ove Knausgaard informed us that he had spent 14 (?) years in Bergen but remembers nothing about it - then proceeds to tell us every detail of his years in Bergen over the next 500 or so pp. Ha! He does something of the same in Book 6, noting that he thinks poetry is the highest of the literary arts (because less dependent on external references; the words themselves rather than what they refer to present the feelings, thoughts, emotions of the writer) but says he has no feeling for poetry or of how to read it - them embarks on one of his digressions, an analysis over 100 pp of so of a poem by Paul Celan. Whew. I have to admit that I skimmed much of this section, having got the point that KOK is an extremely perceptive reader (and scholar) when he so chooses. What did strike me, however, was how, despite all of his analyses of every nuance of ever phrase of the poem and managed to miss the point altogether - until the end! - when he notes that the poem is not only about "death" but also and in particular about the Holocaust and the concentration camps. His point in putting this central observation at the end of his "close reading" to end all close readings is I think to show how our reading of a poem can change when we are aware of some facts about the author's life (Celan was a French Jew who fled to Sweden, I think, during the war; I don't think he was ever imprisoned by the Germans, but he must have lost many family members and friends). So which matters more?: know the language of the poem and all of its nuances? Or knowing how the poem illuminates certain aspects of the life of the writer and of the time and culture in which the writer lived and worked? We know the answer, in that the theme and central action of Book 6, at least so far (40% in) is KOK's "struggle" to publish his life story true as closely as possible to the facts as he knows and recalls them. We respond to the novel because we believe in its veracity; if he had told his story through a fictive narrator and changed all the names and locales, it would not have the same resonance; in other words, we want to read this novel as a memoir (which it is not). Not to say that a deeply personal novel must use the names of the characters - Proust, qv - but we do read In Search of Lost Time differently from how we read My Struggle. Interestingly, both Proust and KOK are obsessed to a degree w/ names (this section of Book 6 is called something like Names and Places; Proust has a central chapter called Place Names: The Place), but they use names differently: one using them as factual grounding, the other as evocative referants.