“In this paper, accordingly, I wish, not to advance any new proposition, but only to reassert the accepted critical principle that for any given: there are correct and incorrect readings...”
This article both cleared up some aspects of poetry for me and also presented many new questions regarding the interpretation of poetry. Interpreting poetry is much harder than interpreting the meanings of books because, as Perrine says, poetry has symbolism that the reader has to interpret correctly. And if not correctly interpreted the poem is greatly misunderstood. Interpreting different symbols can be difficult because, as pairing says, a symbol not only represents itself but also another meaning past itself. This can be difficult to understand in so few lines whereas in the story the reader has many other references to back that symbol up. In a book you have a entire story to understand the style and structure that the author likes using. The reader can implement this, to more easily understand the meaning behind the symbols, but in poems the reader only has a few stanzas to fully understand the work as a whole. Knowing now that each poem has a correct interpretation, I can now seek it out. In addition to this I will now go deeper into understanding a specific poem. For instance, in the poem him by William Blake, I understood the rose to be innocent and the worm to be corruption, however if I just looked deeper into that symbolism I would have seen this story the way beneath.
lacks required depth
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