The quotation provides the reader interesting suggestions about textual analysis. The writer is a teacher, addressing his students: he wants them to reflect on the meaning of reading activity, so that they can appreciate literature and in particular poetry.
Reading poems is an involving activity, but it requires the reader to put himself to test: he must open his mind, reflect on the multiple shades of language (meaning, sound, ambiguity), identify with characters and last but not least feel emotions, but he cannot do it if he stops at the surface-meaning of the text. The teacher seems to admit that understanding poetry is not simple ("you need inquisitive minds" and you have to make "informed judgments based on textual evidence"), but he is likewise sure that a positive attitude toward literary texts provides "benefits".
He tries to make his message clearer in the students' minds, quoting Tennyon's Ulysses (the readers are therefor supposed to know about Tennyson's dramatic monologue). In particular, the teacher creates a parallel between the hero and the ideal reader of poetry: they are seekers of knowledge, disregarding conventional limits and bans, trying to go "beyond the sunset", that is, looking for meaning beyond appearances. Moreover, they are unstoppable, resolute, always ready to enrich their knowledge and revise their certainties in the name of a constant progress.
In addition, the intelligent reader should share two other qualities of Tennyson's Ulysses: courage and tenacity. Despite his old age, Ulysses is courageous enough to make a crucial decision, leaving the throne in in order to travel, explore and discover something new, that is, enjoying his passions and even if he is perfectly aware of the risks of his choice, he does not change his mind nor comes back to Itaca.
Similarly, the reader should never give up: even if he is in front of an apparently senseless text, he is required to make hypothesis, foresee possible meanings and take poetry as a personal challenge: it is a possibility for him to look at the world from a different perspective, find connections between texts and his own experience and defeat banality and suerficiality.
In reading the quotation, I came across numerous reflections that I happened to make during the last three school years. I was not only familiar with the suggestions about textual analysis: I think that Ulysses and the intelligent reader perfectly understood what a student of the liceo scientifico is supposed to understand after five school years: the concept of long-life learning and last but not least the efficacy of the scientific method of research to live in the world (they applied it respectively to reality and to texts).