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Is anyone else interested in poetry here?
A thing I've noticed in poetry analysis that annoys me is what I've come to think of as "schizo" interpretations.
On the one hand, you have symbolism that was likely put into the text intentionally; e.g. in "Ozymandias" (which I assume you are familiar with) the famous "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" can be very reasonably interpreted as the onlooker ironically despairing that even the greatest ruler will eventually decline and be forgotten.
On the other hand you have stuff like "Scholars such as professors Nora Crook and Newman White have viewed the work as critical of Shelley's contemporaries George IV, with the statue's legs a coded reference to the then Prince Regent's gout". How reasonable is this interpretation? I think not very; if the poem had instead referred to the statue's arms or something, would there have been another possible tenuous interpretation to some other person or concept? Probably. You would need some sort of Bayesian intuition for this, as there is a "base rate" of possible random associations you could make – and for any connection less credible than that you're basically finding patterns in random noise.
It reminds me of how the famous schizophrenic programmer Terry Davis would "speak to God"; he had a random number generator that spat out words, and he'd do free associations between them. Textual criticism is rife with this. I suspect it's because there is really no incentive to find out the "truth" of a text, just finding cool associations that makes the reader look smart, and since there's no ground truth to verify anything it easily gets disassociated from reality.
To "fix" this, I propose a calibration game of sorts. One would write a text with actual symbolism and poetic devices, then publishing both the text and a canonical explanation for everything in it. Readers could then interpret it, and afterwards find out how much their interpretation missed the mark. If anyone wants to try this, I have done so with one of my old poems here.
(For the unfamiliar with meter, it's written in straightforward iambic tetrameter, i.e. each line consists of four pairs of unstressed-stressed syllables; with an ABAB rhyme scheme.)
"The Prince"
"The Prince", canonical analysis.
I was a literature major. I enjoy reading but can't match the encyclopedic range of reading of many I used to know. One past girlfriend in grad school it seems had read everything, and took pains to remind people of this, though I suspect that had something to do with her having been transplanted from a high-performing, competitive undergraduate program on the east coast to my unassuming program in the south full of relative dullards like myself. My beerswilling, football-watching friends tolerated her (but only just) because she was exceptionally beautiful.
I enjoy reading and I like more poetry than is probably considered healthy by most people; I have committed a few sonnets of Shakespeare to memory, can quote Roethke, and have attended more than one poetry reading without even getting a little drowsy.
Still, of all my classes, literature classes were often the worst, unless the teacher himself was charismatic enough to hold my interest (I say he only because none of my female literature profs ever really connected with me). Reading your post about the gout interpretation makes me recoil in what is the effete version of PTSD, where I recall the similar highspeed intellectual wheelspinning of many of my lit classes, perhaps especially poetry classes.
Having been an assigned a Burgess essay on Shakespeare, I remember going into class and the professor (another transplant, but from the west coast, and this was to be, for me, the highlight of her class) asked us if, on reading Burgess' suggestion that Shakespeare was partial author of the KJV of the bible, any of us looked up the relevant passage?
Dullards all, no one had. Her response, that echoes to this day: "Well FUCK YOU!"
I say with no trace of sarcasm that I was not fortunate enough to have as many teachers of her spirit. Even she, after this one outburst ( and a subsequent dropping of her course by many Alpha Chi and other sorority girls) became much more dry and uninteresting as a lecturer.
Psalm 46, by the way.
Edited for clarity
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I think that the primary value of art is serving as motivating higher values for individuals and as founding myths for societies. As such, the intentions of the author may make their work more conducive to certain interpretations than others, but I don't ultimately care if for an interpretation that resonates with me it turns out that the author meant something entirely different. The interpretation always lies primarily with the viewer.
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Well, I'm of the opinion that the 'intended meaning' of a poem or piece of media is totally worthless and uninteresting. The very best art taps into aesthetics or concepts that are to some extent transcendent of their contingent features. Some authorial context can be illuminating, but that's all it is - an aid to understand the text.
If that is so, you could very well just entertain yourself with a random word generator like Terry A. Davis, no?
I don't necessarily disagree! Those concepts should in principle be discernible however, and above the "noise floor" of the random associations I'd label "schizo". I don't deny that there might be interesting unconscious features of works, just critiquing the tendency of critics to find signals in random noise.
There's a concept in literature analysis called "death of the author" where they only care about what was written, not whatever the author intended.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathOfTheAuthor
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You could, if the random word generator produced something interesting, but they rarely do. Humans are much better at this.
I suppose that in general I think it uninteresting and futile to figure out what exactly other people think. Shelley is dead, his words remain, and if he meant east but wrote west, west is what's on the page. The greatest authority on what the text means is not the author, but the text itself.
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I appreciate the poetic symbolism, but in the time since Shelly published the poem in 1818, the mummy of Ramses II was discovered in 1881 and is currently in a museum in Cairo. So I also am amused that, contrary to the poem, humans seem able to commemorate great rulers (probably more broadly great humans) for millennia.
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This actually reminds me when I had to read Heart of Darkness in highschool. We were asked what Kurtz meant when he said "The horror, the horror". Naturally, the correct and encouraged answers all had to do with colonialism. I said Kurtz was such an obvious amoral sociopath that "the horror" was that he could be laid low. Given everything we learned about him, all the terrible things he'd done big and small without a thought in the world. Often being praised as a genius for them. Why the sudden deathbed confession? No, I thought "the horror" to him was that he was a great man and he was dying in the middle of nowhere with nothing.
Naturally this was the wrong answer.
How was the “incorrectness” of your answer communicated to you in that class?
It was 20+ years ago. But from what I recall just the teacher trying to get me to shut up a few words in and passive aggressively moving onto the next person.
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