"There are no correct or incorrect readings: there are only readings which differ more or less widely from a statistical norm."- Laurence Perrine
While reading this essay on the validity of poetry's interpretation, I couldn't help thinking that Perrine would be a lot more suited to analyzing some sort experiment with chemicals and test tubes than poetry about roses and stars. The first paragraph started out with some discouraging assessments. Perrine started out with some rough news: poetry can be interpreted incorrectly. He did admit that since the chance to squeeze the true meaning out of the respected authors is rare one, and therefore there is no sure fire way to ensure one interpretation of a poem is true while another is not. However, this fact doesn't stop him from taking three different poems apart sentence by sentence to reveal their true meanings.
A point Perrine brought up in the second paragraph was perhaps the part I enjoyed the most. While quoting Yeats and Elliot about the meanings of their poetry, Perrine stated that defining a poem in fact decreases its value. I heartily agreed with this statement. The mystery of poetry is what I like most about it. I can speculate, evaluate, and contemplate poetry in effort to find its meaning, but the thought that I will never actually know the meaning is oddly titillating (sorry odd word choice).
Moving on. Perrine makes surprising and very solid points as he breaks down the four different poems included in this essay and why two simply rules satisfy his equation for interpretation. His two rules are: 1) and explanation MUST cover all of the details in a poem, or as many as possible and 2) the explanation that does this without stretching itself is the true interpretation. These two rules are extremely effective when used to analyze the Dickens poem and the two comparative poems by Whitman and Melville. I felt I had no choice but to agree with his scientific equation, a concession on my part that didn't feel to good.
Thankfully, Perrine must have been feeling my discomfort because he returned my concession with one of his own. He recognized that interpretations may vary, WITHIN LIMITS (Perrine was very adamant about this point). Using the poem about the sick rose by William Blake, Perrine explained why metaphors like in the earlier poems have one intended meaning while symbols could have several (all within similar agreement of course).
Stuffy and scientific as he may have been, Perrine made some extremely valid points about interpretation, whether I liked them or not.
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