Alright, so as some of you know, I’m not a ‘huge fan’ of poetry. Although I don’t mind reading it, spending hours thinking of all the possible interpretations of a single poem seems a bit pointless to me. Even after reading Blake and Hopkins, my thoughts are still the same, if not more intense.
Personally, I feel as though every author (literature, poetry, film) puts a specific message behind all of their work, and sometimes this can also be a lack of a message. Now I’m not saying that every piece of art only has one interpretation; many books and films are subject to various dissections and often, are made with the intention of ambiguity (the ending to Birdman for instance). The reason I’m so critical of poetry, however, is because people try to find countless meanings for every single word on the page. Not just this, but people spend hours and hours picking these works apart. I’m sure the original poet is quite happy with you doing it, and I’m not trying to suggest that analyzing his/her poetry would be against their wishes. I simply want to know what the point of doing this is. Why spend so much time dissecting 200 odd words?
I’ve heard the argument that “poetry is great because everyone can get their own meaning from it”, but then doesn’t that make it meaningless? If something possesses an infinite number of meanings, then it really doesn’t have any meaning at all. Thus it seems to me that analyzing poems to such an incredible extent really only takes away from the gravity of the work; making the excessive interpreting of poetry pointless. Doesn’t it?
I’m happy to hear any (convincing) arguments to the contrary and am completely open to having my mind changed.
Cara Meyers
November 17, 2015 — 1:13 pm
Hey Jake,
I just wanted to let you know that you aren’t alone; I feel that people sometimes over analyze things. For instance, a few years back, my friend was kind of obsessed with Harry Potter. She ended up buying this massive book about some kind of theory behind the first Harry Potter book. Okay, I’m going to admit that I’ve never read Harry Potter (shock and amazement, I know). However, I don’t know if J.K. Rowling had this huge theory in mind when she wrote Harry Potter. Instead, I think her main goal was to write a book that would entertain children. Not saying, of course, that everything in Harry Potter is without meaning; after all, since the author chose to put every character, setting, etc. into the story, there has to be some reason, some driving force, behind this choice. Yet, not every single one of these reasons will be profound. One character might be symbolic of a person who profoundly affected the author’s life, while another character might have been created simply because the author liked cats.
The same reasoning, could be applied to poetry, I guess. Because the poet chose to write the poem in the way that they did, every word, every component of the poem has to be there for a reason (Hence the reason why people may spend hours at a time analyzing a single word in a piece of poetry. Yet, due to the abstract nature of poetry itself, the meaning of a word may not be literal. Thus, the poem may be “meaningless” to a reader until they analyze and find some symbolic or metaphoric meaning behind the words of the poem. Also because poems are relatively shorter than, say, a novel, I feel that a lot more weight, or significance, is given to the words in a poem than to the words in a novel or an essay. Hence, a single word may be used by the poet in an attempt to portray multiple different thoughts/feelings/etc. and, thus, may have multiple meanings. But, alas, I digress). Thus, even if a poet writes a meaningless poem, there has to be some reason why they felt the need to make it meaningless. And because there is a reason behind writing the meaningless poem, there is also a point behind writing the poem. However, because the author intended to make the poem itself meaningless, it may not be possible to determine the significance of the poem without analyzing the author and their life.
Yet, as you mentioned in your post, the reader may not interpret a literary work in the way that the author intended it to be interpreted. Thus, meaning of the work the reader may be differ from the meaning of the work to the author. But because each person has a different way of thinking and has had different experiences, everyone is going to interpret each piece of art differently. This, as you said in your post, results in there being an infinite number of possible meanings to poetry. In “Leviathan”, Hobbes states: “there is no idea of conception of anything we call infinite. No man can have in his mind an image of infinite magnitude….When we say anything is infinite, we signify only that we are not able to conceive the ends and bounds of the thing named, having no conception of the thing, but of our own inability” (15). Likewise, in math, when we receive an answer to a question that is infinity, positive infinity, or negative infinity, because infinity cannot be quantified and, thus, is not a number, we say that the answer to the problem does not exist. Thus, if people can have infinite interpretations of a single poem, then a universal meaning for the poem does not exist. Hence, it seems to me that your question is: if we cannot have a single, universal meaning to a poem, what is the point in analyzing poetry in the first place? Yet, all works of art, from essays, to novels, to paintings, can be interpreted in many different ways. Though essays and novels tend to be more structured than a poem, there still seems to be some form of ambiguity present in them. After all, as Dr. Hendricks pointed out in lecture yesterday, a lot of people didn’t understand what Freud meant when he said that infants receive sexual pleasure from their mothers. Thus, it is our inability to clearly communicate our thoughts to others that leads to people drawing different conclusions about any literary work or piece of art (I mean, if the poet/author/artist could clearly communicate their thoughts and feelings to others, wouldn’t we draw the same conclusion and, thus, all have the same interpretation of their work?). Thus, even though there tends to be a more widely accepted interpretation of a novel or essay, there still is no universal interpretation. Hence, we could ask: if we aren’t going to have the same interpretation, what is the point in analyzing literature at all? I think that this question is answered quite nicely in the introduction to Freud’s “The Uncanny” by Hugh Haughton. In the introduction, Haughton brings up an essay, written by Walter Pater, called “The Renaissance”. At one point in “The Renaissance”, Pater analyzes the Mona Lisa and, according to Haughton, ends up concluding that “she stands for the idea of ‘modern philosophy’ that ‘humanity’ sums up in itself ‘all modes of thought and life’. This makes her for Pater ‘the symbol of the modern idea’.” (xxxii). Then, Haughton goes on to quote Oscar Wilde: “‘Who’ asked Oscar Wilde, ‘cares whether Mr Pater has put into the portrait of the Mona Lisa something that Leonardo never dreamed of?’ For Wilde it is not the artist but ‘rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age'” (xxxii). Thus, who cares if we don’t interpret the a poem in the same way as the poet? It is the reader who finds meaning in each piece of art, in each poem and makes it relevant to themselves and to their time. It is through reading and interpreting art and literature that we are able to gauge our own thoughts, opinions and beliefs and form new ones. After all, analyzing the art and literature of the past allows us to determine the extent to which we have developed as a society as well as what it means to live here and now. Likewise, analyzing poetry allows you to determine how you think, how you come to view things that are more abstract in nature; it enables you to determine what it means to be you. Thus, if everyone interpreted all art the same way, we would be lacking in individuality. So, something I am going to ask is this: what is the point in analyzing something if we all had the same interpretation?
(Aside: I hope that what I was trying to express here was clear. I think that I was a bit random and that I jumped all over the place. So, if you don’t understand what I am trying to say, please don’t hesitate to say so!)
Helen
November 18, 2015 — 6:04 am
“I simply want to know what the point of doing this is. Why spend so much time dissecting 200 odd words?” Because it’s fun. Some people get a kick out of it. I don’t find watching football particularly entertaining, but some people dedicate their whole lives to it, and that’s fine. I don’t get it, but it’s fine. Likewise with poetry.
It all becomes easier once you make peace with poetry, once you stop seeing it as your enemy or something you need to conquer and more like something you gotta live with, like the fact that I’ll always be short. I don’t necessarily like it, but I accept it and I make do.
At the end of the day, it’s just another medium for starving, tortured artists to express their inner turmoil. (sarcasm.) (maybe.) It allows people to express themselves dramatically through the use of words in a way that’s different from essays or novels or blog posts. Sometimes it can be a more effective way of understanding a poet and their thoughts because it’s so free. People analyze poetry because they want to understand the person and perhaps the time they live in. Why do you think there are still people still writing papers on Shakespeare or Homer or Poe? Because they’re still fascinated by the brilliant minds of these old men (or because they’re forced to by Arts One BUT ANYWAY). But asking why we interpret poetry is like asking why we try to interpret literature to begin with. We do it because we want to understand the world through different eyes. Or we want to understand. Period. And, sometimes, I think of poetry as the modern art of literature. Why is there a red square? Why did he use “ecstatic” instead of “euphoric”? What is the meaning of the black squiggle? Why did she use the horse as a metaphor? It doesn’t always make sense, but sometimes it’s beautiful and sometimes it reveals a new way of looking at the world.
As for whether it’s meaningless or worthwhile to even try to try interpreting poetry? In my opinion, it’s neither. Poetry is poetry. Maybe Blake just wanted to use red, because he liked red, gosh darn it. Or maybe he wanted to use red because it encapsulated the fiery flames of hell that he percieved would swallow up the world. Either way, we will never know the answer and that’s okay! So people do it for the sake of the fact that they enjoy it.
But I would disagree with you on the idea that continuously interpreting works would “take away from the gravity” of it. Like I said, hundreds of years later, there are still people trying to figure out Shakespeare and all those great writers. It’s BECAUSE people keep going back to it. It’s BECAUSE of ambiguity that allows people to keep having discussions about it. It’s BECAUSE of people sitting around for hours dissecting a single word in a line of poetry that keeps these works alive. There may not ever be one coherent reason to a poem, but if there’s one thing that’s for sure, it’s that poetic interpretation is driven by a fascination and love of poetry that’s passed down from generation to generation, but as times change, people will keep coming up with new ideas about it. So we keep talking about it and we will keep talking about it for years to come.
Farah
November 18, 2015 — 10:41 pm
EVERYTHING IS ART.
Actually though, I just want to say that poems can’t have infinite meanings because each word in a poem Really does have a definite meaning (because of language) and Therefore each sentence and therefore the poem. but, In the Scary and imperfect post-contemporary world we live in today, EVERYTHING is subjective, so, we acknowledge that everyone “feels the same thing a different way”. that means that the point of picking apart poetry (just like any other art) is to see what certain words and concepts reflect in our minds and in the minds of others (as well as the mind of the author) and understanding more about ourselves personally and as a species in the process.
Also, what if you’re wrong and poets actually do fit tons of little hidden meanings, messages, metaphors, muses into just 200 odd words?
Christina Hendricks
November 21, 2015 — 11:31 pm
Wow, so many thought-provoking questions and comments here. I can’t possibly reply to all of them, but I will do so to some.
I agree with Farah that it is easily possible that a poet has spent hours, weeks, months, or years picking just the right words for a poem, working very hard to choose words that will provide not just the right meaning, but the right sound and the right ambiguity of meaning that could lead the reader to make connections with something else. I’m not an expert in poetry, but I believe some poets revise their poems multiple times, taking out a word, replacing it with another, trying again, and again, etc., such that every word really does count. I myself can’t possibly do this; I don’t have the talent. But I think many good poets do.
I feel a bit like your question, Jake, about why spend so much time analyzing poetry, may have also to do with the question of why write it. Why should we try to communicate in this concise, rhythmic, sonorous way rather than writing more straightforwardly? It could be because those who do so feel they can’t express what they want to in a more direct way. Maybe using words that are ambiguous, that can link up to other concepts and bring to mind other things, that can evoke emotion just through a word or two, communicates things very differently than writing a philosophy article does (to use an example I’m familiar with!). And perhaps those people who are good at poetry feel that there is something important in that, in what they can only say in a more indirect way. Possibly it’s something to do with the emotion, the associations, the quality of meanings that sometimes are hard to put into words.
I feel this in particular, for example, with Hopkins’ darker poems, what I think Dr. Mota called the “terrible sonnets.” The last stanza of “No Worst There is None” goes like this:
“O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.”
Some things that really get to me about this: (1) “cliffs of fall” evokes falling from the cliffs; (2) “no-man-fathomed” evokes a sense that there are aspects of our minds that none have really understood, but it also brings to mind the depths of the ocean rather than the heights of cliffs (through “fathomed”); (3) “Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there” evokes for me a sense of someone hanging on by their fingertips, desperately, trying not to fall into a “no-man-fathomed” abyss; (4) “steep or deep” brings up that distinction and in fact parallel between tall cliffs and deep oceans, deep abysses–with both it is the same, a “sheer,” “frightful” expanse we can easily slip down and not get back up; (5) “Life death does end”–I love this one because it is saying that death ends life, but it is also suggesting that death, too, does end (as Hopkins would likely have believed as a Christian.
I realize some of this is my own interpretation that might not be shard by others. And, as some have said above, this is still valuable–we learn something about ourselves and about others as well (including the author of the poem). It can make you think differently about human emotions, situations, actions, even if the interpretation you give is not the same as that of others or of the poet herself. It can perhaps help you to sympathize with others in their feelings or their values, if you can start to see the world slightly differently due to what the poet writes.
I don’t know if any of you get a sense of deep-down satisfaction from some forms of music, even if they don’t provide pleasure–some kind of sense of fulfillment, of feeling like something is working so well for you mentally and emotionally, just by listening to the music. I can’t put that into words (as you can tell), but when I think about how some forms of music do that for me (especially those with lyrics), it reminds me of how some poetry seems to communicate something deeply satisfying and meaningful and important, in ways that would be so much less rich than if something similar were said in a few philosophical sentences. The emotional impact wouldn’t be the same, for one. One might think we learn more about the world if we leave emotions to the side as much as possible, but I’m not sure we can really learn how to be human beings in the world, to understand others, without using our emotions. And engaging the emotions is something poetry and literature (and other forms of art) can do better, I think, than my own field of philosophy. (Which isn’t to say philosophy doesn’t invoke emotions; it just often tries not to).
I don’t expect I’ve communicated well what I’d like to about why I think reading poetry and analyzing it is valuable. This is the best I can do at the moment, though.