Intro to Poetry

I believe it is impossible to just make a poem mean whatever the reader pleases. However, it is difficult to come up with a meaning "which relies on the fewest assumptions not grounded in the poem itself". This idea is rather confusing and depends upon how a specific person's brain functions. Surely, I can read a poem and find ideas from it that would be completely wrong. Within a poem itself, there is figurative language which must be broken down and interpreted. If one of these sections is misunderstood, but still applies by Perrine's rule, what happens when the one section makes the entire poem wrong? This is what makes poetry complicated; the infantile meanings and the meaning as a whole. Overall, when reading poetry it is still possible to create a misinterpretation that is still in root with the poem itself.


When hearing Perrine's interpretations of the poems, I realized how far off I was. Yet, I feel some of these interpretations are almost impossible to reach a conclusion on. The only two poems I was even close on were "The Night-March" and the "Sick Rose". Yet, I had only began to realize the stars in the first by concluding that the setting was nighttime. The final poem, I was able to conclude love and sickness. It was not until Perrine put the words together that I then understood. So my strategy from now on is to look at the writer's diction, especially good verbs like "twinkle" and "glimmer" etc and to see if there is a connection. This will imply a much deeper and slower reading, but in the long run will probably allow for more efficiency in understanding poetry.