The Art of Interpreting the Interpretation of an Art

Hmmm...where to begin?

For starters, I hope it's not too erudite of me to say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading Perrine's "The Nature of Proof in the Interpretation of Poetry", because *gosh* I just hate being scholarly.  Alas, I found aspects I disagreed with, but these were miniscule in the grand scheme of the, eh...lecture, essay, paper?  I must admit it was shocking to hear someone take such a stance on one's ability to judge the correctness of poetic interpretation, but I suppose education made me biased.  All my academic life I've been told how awesome I am for pointing out the sailor could stand for a bee or intertwining colors of the sunset or some other outlandish answer that the author most definitely had no intention of conveying to the reader.  But that was what I liked about poetry; it made it simple.  You knew you were never wrong because there were no wrong answers.  I like Perrine because he understands this and doesn't fight it.  He says, "My belief is that a case can be made for all of [the interpretations]; that the symbols allow them all; that we are not forced to choose between the two interpretations of the Dickinson poem or the one by Melville."  I thought his analogy of a field of acceptable interpretations being like a searchlight shining into a night sky hit the nail pretty hard on the head.

Perrine's take on interpreting poetry is something I think I can dig.  Multiple answers are correct, some more correct than others, and there is a definite line to cross into the incorrect region.  The one aspect of this article I had beef with though was Perrine's idea that one can find a be-all and end-all best interpretation of a specific poem or work.  Personally, I saw the section where he proved that Dickinson's poem pertained to the sunset and not a meadow as a highbrow, obnoxious attempt to validate his own self-worth by bashing college freshman.  Maybe that's just because I saw it as a meadow; I don't know.  All of Perrine's arguments were sound and his two criteria for judging the correctness of an interpretation were especially logical, stolen from science no doubt; however, something about his presentation just didn't sit well with me.  I suppose you could say I would make a business deal with the man but I just couldn't see myself being friends with him.  But I digress.  Essentially what I can take from this reading and apply to my individual study of poetry is that I shouldn't just bovine stool my answers when I'm assigned a poetry interpretation assignment, because I won't always be right.