Poetry--Lawrence Perrine

"The Nature of Proof in the Interpretation of Poetry"
Laurence Perrine

I really enjoyed reading this article/essay, but I do not exactly agree with everything Perrine claimed.  He wrote that "there are correct and incorrect readings," but I think that there is no wrong answer when it comes to reading and analyzing poetry.  However, I do think that poets have certain meanings and themes that they want to convey with their works, and readers should be open to those understandings.  For the most part, I agree with Perrine because his theory actually makes very much sense.  He says that the correct interpretation satisfies every detail of the poem and must not contradict any piece of the work.  This makes perfect sense because the poet put every detail in the poem for a specific reason.  He also says that the interpretation must be the most "economical," meaning the one that makes the most sense with all the information present in the poem.  In the fifth paragraph on page 4, Perrine talked about how one detail would bring to mind a wide interpretation, but by taking in more details, we can picture just the one correct image.  As much as I want to disagree with him, this makes total sense.  Actually, the more I think about his theories, the more I agree and say that every poem has just one solid meaning, even though I sometimes don't fully understand it.
      To be honest, Perrine kind of made me feel like a idiot because I did not have the same sense of the poems that he did--especially with the four poems we read for our last assignment.  I thought my interpretations of the poems made sense, but now that I read his, I realize that they make so much more sense.  Every detail of the poems are accounted for, and I see that some of mine contradicted themselves.  However, I don't think we were that far off with our interpretations because he mentioned all of them in the paper--and then disproved them all.  With the Dickinson poem, we thought that it had something to do with nature or a scene with flowers or sailors, but it actually was about a sunset.  Now that I know that, it makes more sense than our initial interpretations; the concrete evidence about the original title and the individual details also correspond to his sunset idea.  With the Rose poem, we were right on with our thoughts on something pure with its evil counterpart, but we missed the difference between the Melville and Whitman poems.  Reading the third paragraph on page 4, I especially felt dumb because he says that the repetition of certain words in the Melville piece "immediately suggests stars," which I totally missed when I read it.  Like most of our class, I thought they were both about the Civil War, or just any war in history.