More on Interpretation
I have to admit that the blog responses to my posts on interpreting poetry are driving me a little bit crazy. It is as if many of you are responding, not to what what I have written, both in posts & in comments, but responding from what you already “know” or “believe” about poetry. Let me ask a blunt question. Does your Business or Engineering prof accept your beliefs about his subject matter if you have not engaged with the material he has presented? Or the material in the textbook?
I guess what is chaffing me a little is that many of the comments express what a person believes about interpreting poetry without actually having engaged the arguments I have made in class & on the weblog. I am open to disagreement, but rational disagreement must be informed. A mere assertion of your belief is not an argument. That is why I suggested in one of my comments that it’s a good idea to actually characterize or describe the idea that you are responding to before you respond. The format should be something like: “So & so says that _____ but I believe _______ because _______ .” I will develop this idea more over the next couple of days, but I wanted to lay it out immediately in order to get this idea into the discussion. I am speaking forcefully & directly, not because I dismiss your thoughts, but because I have a responsibility to help you become better thinkers. Because I respect you, I refuse to let you off easily. But so far, I am mostly seeing people unreflectively & uncritically agreeing with each other. It is REALLY interesting to me that no one has posted a comment to my post about the assigned reading in my post titled Tone [Norton 12/13], though some have posted on the follow-up exercise on tone in poetry. That suggests to me that many of you are not yet taking the material seriously.
So: In comments, I made a distinction between a reader’s response to a poem & making an intellectually defensible interpretation of a poem (or story or movie or song or anything). I would like for you to scan back through the blog posts & comments I have made, especially in the posts What is Poetry? & Quick Thoughts in Response to Comments on Poetry and then engage the actual ideas I have presented. Not your preconceived beliefs, but the actual arguments I (& a few students) have made. I would also like to suggest that you bring in statements from the assigned reading. I don’t go over the stuff in the textbook between the poems because I assume you are reading & understanding it. That material might be useful in formulating your positions. I have suggested, both in class & here on the blog, that despite the “everyone has their own interpretation” idea that seems so common, what is really interesting is that we almost universally agree about the central meaning of poems. Why is this?
Update: Let me note that the comments on the Auden poem I’ve read tonight are engaging the material. Bravo!
January 28, 2007 @ 10:44 am
Poems often seem to adress the same key topics (death, love, sex) with these come similiar emotions. Furthermore, it seems as though most high school and collegiate classes are taught to get students to think in a certain realm of primarily classical views when reading poetry. I read an article for Professor Duemer’s Great Ideas class last semester in which the author talked about not knowing how to respond to a lit professor’s question even when he had read and understood the material. At this point most students use phrases that they believe the professor is looking for. You can blame this on any number of things (standardized testing). Sometimes the “stuff between the poems” helps me to pick up on key words or ideas that I would have otherwise missed but all in all it just seems to resonate the same ideas i have heard for the last 6 years of english class and in every other english text.
January 28, 2007 @ 4:07 pm
I like what you are saying here, and I think that it is very true. As much as a teacher may want his students to think analytically and creatively, there is almost always a general direction and message that the teacher is trying to impress on the students. This is because the teacher already has his pre-notions about the meaning of the poem that is being reviewed. I am not saying that this is a bad thing, merely that you will be lead down a certain path of thought when a teacher explains a poem, and that could change your own opinion about the poem.
January 28, 2007 @ 8:04 pm
I think both Nick & Alex raise important questions about poetry in a university classroom. While both poetry & physics, say, are areas of human intellectual activity, we think differently about poetry. Here’s a question & I don’t mean it sarcastically at all: Why do students feel qualified to question what their Literature professor tells them, but not their Physics professor? Like I say, it’s a serious question & I’d really like to hear your responses.
January 28, 2007 @ 10:27 pm
I think the reason that poetry tries to capture these emotional feelings, that are brought on by the situations Nick expressed is because times and cultures may change over time but emotions don’t. The sadness that you feel today when someone close to you passes away would be the same now as it was a thousand years ago, as it will be in another thousand years. Same goes for the feeling of love.
January 29, 2007 @ 12:31 am
In response to Prof. Duemer’s comment, I would have to say that students feel they can question their Literature professor’s thoughts because of the fact that literature is open to interpretation. In my opinion, poets and other writers often leave it up to the reader to interpret their works, regardless of the reader’s educational background. That is not meant to dispute the fact that the professor is more qualified and better able to accurately interpret the work, but to state that it is also possible for students to form intelligent opinions about works of literature. This is contrary to a subject such as Physics, which is (for the most part) set in stone. It is certainly more difficult to question something that you are learning for the first time when there is only one interpretation, as opposed to literature, which has multiple potential interpretations.
January 29, 2007 @ 10:02 am
I agree with the points that Scott makes. Additionally, I believe that a literature professor would almost be excited to have a student challenge their opinions because it shows that the student is critically thinking and interpreting. Clearly it shows that the student is at least reading the material, which has got to be the biggest challenge for a teacher. In a class like physics, however, it is so much harder to challenge a teacher because you are learning instead of interpreting. There are very few people in the world who can correctly refute any standing physics theories, and those people are not likely to be sitting in a class being taught those things for the first time. Literature is an art, and the arts are subject to creativity. Physics is a science, and science is based on facts. It’s a fundamental difference.
January 29, 2007 @ 11:28 am
I agree with Scott in regards to Prof. Duemer’s comment, because literature is open to different types of interpretation. Poetry can be interpreted in many different ways depending on many variables, but in physics there is only one set definition for, say, the acceleration due to gravity, so the students must accept what their prof. tells them and not dispute that.
January 29, 2007 @ 1:30 pm
I believe various interpretations can arise from a single poem. In particular class discussion regarding William Blake’s- London Prof. Duemer commented that the last stanza in the poem refers to possible “prostitution” due to such words as “curse, blights, and plagues”. However, when I read this poem poem I interpreted this stanza to refer to bastard children whom have lost their father, a possible soldier, since his blood runs down the Place walls.
Did anyone else get a similar interpretation to this stanza?
January 29, 2007 @ 3:21 pm
As I’m reading the posts I agree stongly with what Scott and Alex are saying. As students we question not to disrepect our professor, but to engage in conversation and share our point of views. Rob as for your interpretation of the London Poem, I think I would agree with you if the poem only talked about soldiers, I could see it. However I’m going to have to go with Prof. Duemer on this one. I too think it is talking about prostitution and not only because of the words that are used, but because it seems as though each stanza is talking about a different ’subject’, for lack of a better word. The author mentions Soldiers in the 3rd stanza however I think that the last stanza was meant to be seperate from the soldier idea. Am I making sense? The first line in the last stanza and the use of “midnight streets I hear” to me signals the voice of prostitutes talking to men.
January 31, 2007 @ 12:32 pm
Steph I def. understand what you are saying regarding the changing of context from stanza to stanza. However, I evaluated the poem on a continuous basis, not each paragraph separately. That’s why I felt that each previous paragraph set the stage for the next stanza, for lack of a better word, as a building block. But, I understand your point of view as well.
I think that goes back to the main discussion of the fact that interpretations of poetry are mostly similar, however details and specifics are influenced by our personal beliefs, insights, and notions
March 10, 2007 @ 5:25 pm
I found the definition of a poem in a dictionary, and it gives me two explanations. The one is ‘a literary composition, typically, but not necessarily, in verse, often “with elevated and/or imaginatively expressed contents”, and the other one is an object, scene or creation of “inspiring beauty.”
According to these, I organized my thought of “why we almost universally agree about the central meaning of poems.” As we know, the meaning defined in a dictionary is generally and universally recognized, accepted, and has been used worldwide. Then, let’s look into the universal definition. “To inspire beauty with elevated and/or imaginatively expressed contents”, there should be the central meaning.
First, we don’t think of something as beauty without any reasons. That is, there are some particular contents that arouse beauty and no exception in poems. So, there exists the main meaning in a poem.
Second, there is a core to enlarge the meaning. In terms of a poem, the cardinal meaning precedes elevation and imagination.
April 28, 2007 @ 2:23 pm
Why do students feel qualified to question what their Literature professor tells them, but not their Physics professor?
I think that the reason taht students feel qualified to question what their literature prfessor tells them but not their physics professor because literature has different interpretations. Physics on the other hand, is either right or wrong. Literature seems to be much more open ended and a whole lot less straight forward. Physics is taught a certain way and there are tests given that has answers that are either right or wrong. In literature, you can have essays and responses to interpret or analyze different pieces of writing/poems or whatever, but there is usually no finite yes or no answer to an interpretation.