a nice passage out of peckandcoyle, good to keep in mind (:
The instinctive critical reaction, particularly if one is just beginning to study poetry, is to search for a single meaning in a poem, a clear statement of what it is saying. Criticism is not, however, really concerned with searching for a simple, reductive interpretation of a poem, but instead acknowledges the complicating effect of imagery and the levels of ambiguity that can exist in a text. This is a matter of seeing how the poet uses language to indicated the complexity of the experience he or she is trying to understand. We should attempt to reverse our instinctive attitude of looking for one meaning in a peom in favour of seeing that the language of poetry is full of conflicting, ambiguous meanings. The danger in such an approach is that everything can be represented as ambiguous and the plain sense of the poem can disappear unless one remembers that ambiguity is concerned with complexity of meaning in the words, not with improbable meanings of the poem as a whole.
pretty good - i'd recommend the book too - Literary Terms and Criticism; the one mr p talked about last year.
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Sunday, August 28
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