If it may please his highness, I would like to state that I've really enjoyed these past few essays we've read about what makes a good reader and now, the limits of interpreting poetry. They've both been provocative (provocative in the scholarly way and... ahem, fondling the details, anyone?) and mentally stimulating in that they've both suggested radically new ways of viewing literature. "The Nature of Proof in Interpretation of Poetry" by Laurence Perrine has had the most effect on me because, though not nearly as radical as the Nabokov piece, I felt the message of limiting poetry to finite interpretations was incredibly well founded. What first struck me was Perrine's reasoning of how a poet will (almost) never limit their poetry. It's much too like an insult to themselves that they must explain what they meant by what they wrote and could be a kind of insult to the reader of the poem because they did not have the insight to correctly interpret the feelings of the author. Perrine said it better than I did just now with my watered-down analysis, but in this respect, I'm illustrating exactly what he's trying to convey. A poem, or a few lines of prose, has the most punch-in-the-gut effect when left to mean what it was meant to mean by itself. Next, he gives us the two criteria for correctly interpreting poetry.
1) "A correct interpretation, if the poem is a successful one, must be able to account satisfactorily for any detail of the poem. If it is contradicted by any detail it is wrong. If several interpretations, the best is that which must fully explain the details of the poem without itself being contradicted by any detail."
2) "If more that one interpretation satisfactorily accounts for all the details of the poem, the best is that which is most economical, i.e. which relies on the fewest assumptions not grounded in the poem itself."
To help illustrate these criteria in action, Perrine puts them to use on an untitled Emily Dickinson poem. Probably the biggest shock for me in this piece was how he rips apart the "garden" interpretation of the poem. From the amalgamation of interpretations he posed to his students, one could interchange my interpretation and the students' interpretations with little to no discrepancy. Let me tell you, I felt like some pretty hot stuff with my "garden" interpretation, but Perrine uses each criterion to successfully prove the "sunset" reading of this poem. He could have stopped there because I was thoroughly convinced of his point, but he presses on, tackling the anomalies that are symbols. The poem he used as an example, in contrast to the Dickinson poem which was either about a garden or a sunset, was definitely about a rose and a worm. However, the language suggests that the rose and worm are something more. This grey area of what they could stand for is where some go awry. Just like the Dickinson poem which had definite a definite scene of a sunset, so too do the rose and worm have definite parameters of what they could stand for. From the details we get the rose is something inherently good, and the worm is some form of corruption. The limits come in that the rose could never be something other than good such as an innocent beauty, the ideal mankind, etc. The worm could never be anything but some corrupting agent. He makes his final comparison in his last statement, "A rose is a rose is a rose, and is more than a rose. But a rose is not an ink blot. Nor is a poem." Which I liken to a wonderful saying from my days in geometry, "All squares are rhombi; however, not all rhombi are squares."
Something to ponder and correctly interpret:
High-schoolers: If you are described as a “square”, don’t be too concerned. If you are called a “rhombus” start to worry. This more complex polygon, plus the additional syllable, suggests you have also alienated your more intelligent peers.
ParalleloWHAM!
I think I've taken this rhombus thing a bit too far...
