The Nature of Proof in the Interpretation of Poetry...How I See It

The first sentence of the poem made me think that I would agree with a majority of the information that Perrine supplies: "That a poem may have varying interpretations is a critical commonplace."

However, the sentence immediately following that changed my mind: "That all interpretations of a poem are equally valid is a critical heresy."

There were some things in the essay that I disagreed with, but once I got through the entirety of it, I ended up understanding Perrine's perspective and actually thinking the same way. I was initially surprised when he suggested that an author is the worst interpreter of his own work. Though it seems paradoxical at first, when Perrine explains his backing, it comes to make more sense. Though it is true that an author knows best what he means, what he reveals publicly is not the extent of his true feeling. Therefore, a reader may stop midway in his descent into what the poem truly means and specifically what it means for the reader himself. If the author says that his poems mean one thing, the reader won't look for anything else. Like Yeats once said, "If an author interprets a poem of his own, he limits its suggestibility."

But, it is also true that, like Perrine states, not all interpretations, even if it is how the reader sees it, are correct. The connections made between the interpretation and the actual words have to be logical and without flaw. Perrine's first example of his claim using the Dickinson poem were somewhat weak, I felt. He based it on just very basic and general happenings that contradicted the interpretation of the poem, but the world isn't always as general as he makes it out to be. In his second example, he provides much more reasonable and effective proof for this theory. He points out the words like "beaming", "bright", "gleam", "twinkling", and "shining" that make it much more clear and visible that Melville's poem addresses the stars, not an army corps, and he also uses the contradictory elements of the poem such as the fact that the soldiers marched without a chief in order to make the original idea about the poem (that it was literally about an army corps) seem illogical. Even in his paragraphs about symbolism, he shows that interpretations have boundaries. Certain details set the limits for how our minds can perceive a certain image. In one example, he says a horse without the word "roan" can be interpreted as many different types of horses (i.e. a "workhorse", a "clotheshorse", etc.), but with that one word added it can only be viewed as a real horse. Even just the word "horse" limits the reader's interpretation because a horse cannot be a cow. 

Like the details in a poem limit the poem's meaning, so do details surrounding a symbol limit the things it can symbolize. I guess this essay just proves the point that readers must go deeper than just the surface or hovering right underneath it when interpreting literature.