Perrine's Poetry? Preposterous!

To be honest, I have never been a big fan of poetry. While they are usually short reads, their brevity often deceptively conceals their depth. The frustrating part of studying poetry is it seems too often that my friends and I will have about five different interpretations of the poems, and after arguing and debating amongst each other, we will then be told by the teacher that they are all, in fact, valid. I am alright with several valid interpretations existing. What exacerbates, though, is the fact that there commonly seems to be no end to the number of different valid interpretations of a poem. Often in English classes of the past, if you could argue your interpretation, and it sounded at least half-good, then the teacher decided it was not worth arguing and would deem it a satisfactory interpretation. In other cases, the opposite was true: any interpretation that was not an exact replica of the teacher's, no matter how well-supported, was struck down. Because of this, I found myself agreeing with Perrine's discussion of "correct" interpretations of poetry and his approach. Perrine's approach of logically analyzing an analysis was a much-appreciated guideline for interpreting poetry. At last, we have a method that makes sense!

Of course, now that I have a legitimate guideline for interpreting poetry, I have realized just how poor my interpreting skills are. Among the three poems (or sets of poems) that we read, I correctly interpreted "The Rose and the Worm." That was it. My interpretations of the other two were grossly off the mark. In both of my analyses, I took a far too literal approach. In Dickinson's poem, I used the little knowledge I had of Dickinson and her reclusive lifestyle and assumed that the poem had a melancholy feel. Because of this, I think I twisted the poem to fit my idea that the poem must be a reflection of the futility of materialistic wealth (the "ships of purple," which was the color of royalty, the "seas of daffodil," the color of gold, and the "fantastic sailors" that all disappear when "the wharf is still"). Perrine's explanation, however, made a great deal more sense. While his analysis of Dickinson's poem was not too surprising, his analysis of Melville's poem, on the other hand, threw me. When I studied the differences between Melville's and Whitman's poems, I primarily focused on their descriptions of the armies, and, therefore, their idea of war. It did not even occur to me that Melville's poem was not, in fact, about an army. I was so occupied with an analysis of diction that I failed to realize what that diction actually meant.

Basically, I found Perrine's approach comforting in that I now have a method to utilize, but disconcerting in that I have a long way to go.