About Mr. Laurence Perrine

Mr. Perrine would contend that there are certain absolutes to poetry, and while that may be true, his search for a standard by which to grade his students has proven detrimental to the breadth of his interpretation of poems. Take Dickinson's four line poem about ships and flowers and sunsets (perhaps). Mr. Perrine is correct in so far as the sunset interpretation is better than saying Dickinson is writing about a meadow. But the meadow interpretation dails only with a limited imagination--or, again, one stunted by the needs for absolute answers in a teaching environment. The meadow interpretation is not incorrect, but merely less complete than that of the sunset, and the only way to make a definite conclusion about what Dickinson is writing about rests on the inclusion by her editors of the title "Sunset" and other circumstantial evidence in other poems that she has written--evidence that exists outside of the body of the specific poem in question and which, therefore, should have no bearing whatsoever on the poem's interpreation; I agree wholeheartedly in Mr. Dods in his call to seal off the work under examination (whether we should be examining poetry in the first place is another matter entirely) from all unrelated information. So while one may argue that the poem itself is flawed if clarity is the standard by which one chooses to judge it, one cannot fairly say that the meadow interpretation is categorically false. To interpret the poem as being about Martians would be beyond the bounds of possibility as laid out by the poem, and therefore such an interpretation is ridiculous. Thus I do not entirely disagree with Mr. Perrine on the matter of poetic interpretation, but differ by degree in terminology and the setting of bounds within which to examine the poem. Now, regarding Melville's The Night March...Mr. Perrine' interpretation of the army as stars, set in order by an absent God is perfectly vaild, but what is incorrect in viewing the soldiers as merely soldiers whose commander is dead but who fight on for the same cause anyway? Their archaic arms do not disqualify them from actually being soldiers; Melville has just as much right to write about medieval soldiers as he does about earthworms or as I do about goings on at a bazaar in Morrocco (where I have never been). To throw out this interpretation is close-minded and unimaginitive in the extreme. Indeed, whether one believes that the soldiers are soldiers or the soldiers are stars, it is quite easy to approach the question of the presence or absence of God from either angle, which only speaks to Melville's skill as a poet. To allow (at least) two equally valid and clear paths of interpretation to lead to the same conclusion is impressive and stands as a strong argument for Melville's purpose in writing the poem.
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Now for something somewhat different...
Poetry, as has often been asserted, is about conveying an experience to the reader, and I do not agree with that, though I do believe that poetry can be much more than that. But to adhere merely to the realm of the conveyance of experience, I would like to delve a little deeper into the manner in which that experience is conveyed. Say I write a poem about being a bat, and forget all about tone and theme and meaning; maybe I like being a bat, maybe I don't, it's not important for what we're doing here. What is important is that I am not a bat, I cannot become a bat, nor will I ever be able to converse with a bat to find out what being a bat is like. Therefore, when I write a poem about being a bat, I am putting human feelings, senses, and whatnot onto the framework of what it is to be a bat. A bat, should it be able to understand English/the inner workings of the human mind (and not any human mind, but mine specifically), would not be able to make sense of what I have written because I made it all up. I came as close as I possibly could to being a bat in my imagination and then transformed that experience into a poem. But it was only imagination, and words can only partially capture experience, even fabricated, anyway. So the poem isn't about being a bat, it's about pretending to be a bat. It isn't a record of experience, but a very close (if I am succesful as a poet and have a good imagination and grasp of bat physiology) representation of the experience of being a bat. Poetry is not true experience, but the representation of experience, converted not just into human terms, but into the specific poet's terms. A skilled poet draws closer and closer to the truth of the experience (if there even is such a thing), and here I feel math allegories are relevant: think of limits to infinity. Never truly obtainable, but if your approximation is accurate enough, you can perform complex calculations and send probes whizzing past Pluto. Humans may have more in common than bats do, which facilitates some level of empathy between one another, but no human is exactly like another, and thus the lense through which we view the world is inherently different than everyone elses, thus interpretations of poems and songs and movies will vary, as do religious creeds and understandings of science and mathematics. But then the question arises--if poetry is a form (albeit a glorified, intensified form) of communication, then is all communication merely a close approximation of some greater or more true truth? Perhaps. To believe so would be very platonic, but I'm not particularly interested in pinning down whether such a thing as absolute truth exists or not. To be honest, I think it's pointless--an unproveable point, and one better decided on an individual basis. Perhaps I will rant about this later, but not at present.
Anyway, digressions aside, poetry, I'd like to think, strives to be an ever-more-perfect representation of experience (among other things), but should not be confused with things as they actually are. Indeed, it is critical to understand the distinction for any proper interpretation of poetry (should you want to descend into such a nasty past time); it is only with the acceptance of the fact that poetry is not real but rather true that we can begin to pick greater meaning out of the core experience. Poetry can, thus, never be about absolutes, or absolute interpretations, though I find myself dangerously close to making absolute pronouncements. Oh noes.
I may pick this up later and continue, we shall see.