Perrine Poetry Blog Entry

As I first read page 1 of Perrine's article regarding his belief on interpreting poetry, I completely disagreed with him.  I did not agree that only the author's interpretation of his or her poetry was the only correct one.  Surprisingly, though, I ended up agreeing with Perrine.  I agree that we only are truly correct when we interpret the same as the author. We will never fully understand a poem if we try to alter the details of it to match our thoughts.  When Perrine said that we "must be able to account satisfactorily for any detail," I found this to be really surprising.  I had never thought of this when I have interpreted poems.  However, I honestly agree with him on this.  Adding in our twist into a poem alters the author's purpose, and we have no right to change what the author was writing about.  After reading this article, I have noticed that I do not sufficiently interpret poems.  I often would read it and guess what it meant, adding in my own details that never were actually mentioned in the poem.  (I did exactly what Perrine described in the example of wrongly understanding Emily Dickinson's poem about a sunset).  Hopefully after reading this, I am able to more closely interpret poems.  I think that it will cause me to take longer in searching for an understanding of them, but I really think that it will help me be more accurate in doing so.

One thing that struck me in this article was how off I was in my interpretation of Herman Melville's poem titled "The Night-March."  I assumed that it was about an army, similar to Walt Whitman's poem that was paired with it.  I obviously did not pay close enough attention to Melville's details.  As Perrine explained, Melville included multiple words to hint at the fact that he was writing about stars.  However, I showed a lack of attention to this, and I was very off in my understanding of the poem.  When we discussed these poems in groups last week, not one person in my group correctly interpreted this poem.  I think that this further proves that students do not recognize the best way to interpret poems.  Because two poems that we assumed to both be about armies were grouped together, we did not read deep enough into Melville's poem.  Readers must pay closer attention to details of poems; most authors do not make their poems easy to understand.  They require deep thought and imagination.  Authors put much effort into writing quality poetry; we should put equal effort into understanding their works.