So this is poetry

I was really dreading having to read The Nature of Proof in the Interpretation of Poetry by Laurence Perrine. However, I actually  learned a lot from it and found it very interesting. For my two paragraphs I am going to answer these two questions: What idea/strategy/concept do you agree with? and What can you use from this article to help guide your study of poetry in this class?


Although I have not spent a ton of my years in school studying poetry, I always thought that a poem could be interpreted any way the reader wanted to interpret it. Boy was I wrong. Perrine immediately states that this idea is "a critical heresy". Nevertheless, the more I read the essay, the more I agreed with Perrine. Poems don't have to have one set meaning, but they can't just mean anything we want them to mean. I liked his example of the poem The Sick Rose by William Blake. When we were asked to read this poem for homework, I thought that the rose symbolized love or a lover and the worm symbolized what went wrong in the relationship. (this was the only poem I got even close to being right) Anyways, Perrine goes on to explain that the rose must mean something beautiful or desirable and the worm must mean some kind of corrupting agent but the two things can't just mean anything. Perrine relates his idea to an ink blot. Poems are not like ink blots, poets have a specific purpose for writing their poems and they strive to have the reader understand these meanings.


I think this article could be very helpful in studying poems in class.  I really liked when Perrine said that a correct interpretation of a poem must explain details in the poem and not rely on assumptions based on things outside of the poem. Personally, when I attempt to interpret poems, I find myself assuming things and stating a meaning that is based on things I don't know for sure. Perrine states that we have to use the details given in the poem and not rely on outside sources. As I study poems now, I will try to interpret the meaning based on what the writer has given me. When I feel like I have discovered the meaning, I have to make sure that it is not far-fetched and the details in the poems support my analysis. Perrine's example of Emily Dickinson's poem helped explain this theory. Although the garden meaning could be right, the sunset meaning is more applicable. The garden meaning doesn't define all the details in the poem and relies on assumptions like the wind stopping. In order for a poem to be correctly interpreted, the meaning has to satisfy all the details of a poem.