*Beware - Rant ahead*
As I've said before, science and I have never seen eye to eye. Similarly, poetry and I have never been the best of friends. However, contrary to science, it wasn't until just recently that I finally admitted to myself that I severely disliked poetry in almost all forms, be it rhythmic or free verse, sonnet or elegy. Although I must say that free verse frustrates me just a little bit more. The lack of structure stresses me out when I read it and can't fall into a rhythm, especially when a line ends but the sentence continues on the next which makes me start the whole phrase over.
Additionally, in my various forays into different kinds of literature and literature forms, I have found that poetry is the form which makes me ask most often "What is this supposed to mean?!" No matter how much time I spent poring over "Tintern Abbey," I just couldn't get the sense of what Wordsworth was trying to tell me in some passages, and that was using the language of "real men" that was so prominent in his time period. If you ask me, he felt nostalgic when he revisited this hill above Tintern Abbey and tried to express his nostalgia in words and lines. But my English professor wasn't satisfied with that. There had to be something more, something more meaningful, more deep, something more.....what? Why can't we be satisfied that Wordsworth was just being nostalgic? This is my core issue with studying literature so far.
Along a similar vein, in another class about writing our own criticism, we get scolded if our paper topics are too close to the "standard interpretation" of the text (thankfully short stories, not poems). But we still have to come up with something that lines up with the author's views and opinions, so in this case, anything really happy is out of the question. One of my paper topics was shot down because it was too "Pollyannaish" and too positive for the given author. This is a different argument, but how am I supposed to know what every scholar has been saying about these stories since 1923 or whenever it was published??? Anyway, back to finding deeper meaning behind short poems.
I get frustrated when we read a very short poem for British Literature and then have to write a journal entry about it explaining the key ideas that tie it into Victorian Literature, provide a critical response (whatever
that means), and then pick several key quotes. I find this problematic because I firmly believe that some of the poems we have read were written because the author felt like it. They just had these words in mind that went well together and decided to write them down. In other words, not every piece of poetry written by a poet (even the most famous) can be applied to Victorian ideals, or Romantic ideals, or whatever. What's wrong with saying that they wrote the poem simply to entertain? Christina Rossetti said that her poem "Goblin Market" was written as a children's story. However, after having read a biographical sketch of her and other interpretations of the poem, one would be led to believe that many critics are discounting what she herself has said about her own works and then are putting words in her mouth about what the poem
really means. I mean, I love literature, but this is too much.
But! I ate my own words (a lot of them) this past week while reading, ironically, Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market." In the biography preceding her poetry in my monstrous Norton collection of British Literature, it said that the poem is clearly
not a symbolic retelling of the Fall of Adam and Eve. After reading through the poem (which was about 5 pages long, so this isn't really the same argument), I thought to myself, whoever wrote that biography is crazy! This is a blatant retelling of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the idea of redemption! I did exactly what I just shot down, I put words in Christina's mouth and told Norton off for misrepresenting her poetry.
So what do you do? It's also important to remember that my rant is unreliable because I've only been doing this for 2 semesters now. As far as finding new topics and the ethics of interpreting an author's intention...I'll probably either get over it or find out how it's justifiable. But finding a deeper meaning behind poems shorter than a page long? Forget it. I'm not sure I'll ever buy into it. No matter what anybody tells me, I'll always hold fast to the idea that a lot of poets wrote poetry simply because they wanted to. Or at least I'll take the poem at face value.
Now, academia, go crazy and deconstruct this post and find out what I REALLY meant to say!
