Perrine Blog

I found Perrine's article to be extremely insightful and helpful in interpretting poetry. After reading this article, I was able to understand that my interpretations of the poems in class were not entirely correct. I would have never guessed that Melville's poem had anything to do with the stars and constellations. However, Perrine states that "there are no correct or incorrect readings: there are only readings which differ more or less widely from a statistical norm." Though I feel that correct and incorrect interpretations of poetry exist, I believe that the interpretation of poetry is subject to change depending on the reader. I agree with Perrine that the interpretation of poetry can be judeged based off of two criteria: all details must be accounted for and too many assumptions cannot be made. Once too many assumptions are made, the validity of the interpretation becomes less reliable. All details are put in poems for a particular reason, the reader cannot just disregard details that they find inconsequential.

Many of Perrine's tools he uses when interpretting poetry are quite useful in my opinion. For example, I really enjoyed his thoughts on the usage of symbols in poems. As he analyzed Blake's poem, he stated that symbols can have many different interpretations, but they must all have the same general meaning. For example, the rose must stand for something "good" or "innocent", and the worm must stand for something "bad" or "deceitful." I believe that symbol interpretations can be multiple, but misinterpretting the symbols could lead to a false interpretation of the poem itself. Each person will interpret the symbols different, and as a result, there interpretations of their poems as a whole may differ. I think one problem I had with figuring the meaning of symbols was that my interpretations were too literal. I think that after reading this article, my interpretations of poetry will be more valid.(hopefully!)