For those of us who studied in the 60s and 70s, it was one or another movement, like New Criticism, Psychoanalytic criticism, Feminist criticism, Structuralist theory, Deconstruction, etc. Each a new form of literary interpretive tyranny! If you've mastered all of these approaches, there's not a poem in the history of poetry that can get by you.
I've pulled this paragraph from the previous blog post, "Onions" (4.28.22). The thought occurred to me when I wrote it that there is more to say on the subject of being so steeped in literary theories that no poem can "get by you."
Of course, as art, all true poetry resists being fully defined and understood, subjugated as it were, by readers, even readers as knowledgeable and astute as Harold Bloom. It is the business of a poem to remain a mystery to us, to always withhold something of itself from us. Otherwise, it fails as a poem, at least in some small way.
Blake insisted, "we murder to dissect," and generations of readers and scholars have taken this statement as an argument against interpreting art, poetry especially. Or at least against paraphrasing it or explaining what it means or essentially rewriting it into our own language. In our desire to not let poems get by us, we destroy them. Poems are supposed to be artifacts unto themselves, whole and unified. Any mucking about with them, a slice here, a puncture there, a prod elsewhere to get at what they "mean" results only in what we want them to mean. The poem itself is what the poem means.
Inexperienced writers will take this as a warning not to critique their work, or any apparently obvious lyric, for that matter. My friends at Wednesdays@One have often accused me of over-interpreting their poems. They wrote the poem, after all, and they know what they had in mind when they wrote it. Or, they wrote the poem and the language is clear because the words are common and the images straightforward because the figures of speech behind them are well-worn and tested.
"My love is like a red, red rose."
Nothing too difficult about that. We're talking about a flower and a color that everybody's familiar with, and we're using a standard simile to compare a loved one to that colorful flower. There's not an obscure, difficult Latinate word in the line. What could be clearer?
Well, what could be clearer, that might reveal greater depths of meaning to the line, is an understanding of how often this comparison has been made in Western poetry over the centuries. What could be clearer, and would surely lead to a deeper understanding of the line, is why someone would compare a person to a flower, and a red one in particular. And what could be clearer is a better understanding of all the associations any given reader might have with the image of a red rose, or what mere "likeness" means when we make such a comparison (instead, for instance, of a complete identification, an "is-ness," if you will).
We can't get at these other possibilities of meaning without also considering our own biases when it comes to writing and reading a text, or without using certain tools of discussion (if not interpretation), like feminist theory or deconstruction theory or Marxist literary theory or reader response theory, etc., etc., etc.
And yet. Even if you've mastered all these theoretical approaches, become intimate with the history of red roses and similes in Western poetry, or even understand to the bottom your own drives and biases, you will never get to the bottom of this line or any poem that it is found in. You will never fully grasp, own, subjugate the line or the poem.
This is not license to blatantly misread any line or poem. You can't make a poem say whatever you want it to say. The poem itself is what the poem means. All you can do, and all you should ever wish to do, is try to understand how you experience it at different times in your writing or reading life. Reading a poem, any real poem, is a never-ending experience--there is no bottom to it.
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