Edited by: Ananya Khandelwal (UG 21)
Can poetry be understood? Is it possible to transfer the poet’s feelings and emotions in the correct way, to a different time and space? Poetry as an art is not simple. The complexity arises in its interpretation and understanding which is a subjective phenomenon because not everyone reads a poem in the same way and with the same mood; even the same person’s reading of a poetry differs every time they read it. Then how should we read poems? How can we arrive at a common level to bring some uniformity in poetry? These questions might seem complex but the answer to them is very simple. Scholars argue that even with such variations, there is a certain commonality with which poems can be inferred. This similar understanding comes from reading poetry through pre-described steps and following a certain pattern. Multiple interpretations of poetry make it difficult for a poem to be taught but at the same time these varying viewpoints help a reader to know, how others read the poem that they might have read in a different way. Reading poetry is based completely on the reader’s discretion which cannot be fed into him because the emotions that each reader grasps from a poem differ based on the mood and cultural understanding of the reader. Therefore, even though certain metric of reading and understanding poems may be devised, a poem will always have multiple interpretations which cannot be let go with.
We need to understand why such differences arise. What happens is that we select different aspects of a message to focus our attention on, based on what interests us, what is familiar to us, or what we consider as important. Different meanings arise because of our belief systems, past experiences, culture, faith and values, which are known as individual differences. Our childhood experiences, our present conditions, our state of mind plays an important role in our way of seeing poetry.
‘The Mental Crusher’ Butler, Fennel, Hackman 2008
Reading poetry has never been easy for me. Especially, when it comes to understanding what is conveyed in the poem, my mind takes a backseat. I have a hard time because I feel that a poem should be understood with the mind of the poet otherwise his/her efforts behind that writing would be lost. Even according to Isabel C. Hungerland, wherever feasible, the poetry should be read in a way the author would read it because he is somewhat more familiar with his own work, and is often himself a critic of high sensitivity. On the contrary, treating every poem from the poet’s point of view will not be possible because it is difficult for the writer’s thought to travel the constraints of time, space and people. Scholars associate the different interpretations with the psychology of human brains while another group argues that differences arise because you try to understand poetry not just from its words but also bring in the poet’s intention in play. Setting ground rules and following them to arrive at a somewhat uniform reading of poetry is another method that has been suggested to avoid the confusion but its critics have pointed out that fixing metric is not a good idea because once a poem leaves the artist’s hand it is entirely the reader’s discretion on how they want to read it.
Helmut Hungerland says that by using evaluative criticism which involves using pre-decided norms and standards that are not based on personal preferences, we can arrive at a fairly similar understanding of poetry. They further argue that the focus while reading a poem should never be on the intention of the poet but rather just on the words of the poem because the writer has chosen the words carefully and knows what to bring to the readers and what not to.
The argument about varying explanations of poetry is fairly old and to prove this, a research was conducted where one Walt Whitman poem was given to three animators to interpret. They were given a recording of the text of three poets who also interpreted the poem in their own way. The result? A stunning video that breathes three very different lives into Walt Whitman’s timeless poem, “A Noiseless Patient Spider.”
‘Different Interpretations’ Dickey, LaBracio, Labovic 2018
It is an undeniable fact that the people will have multiple viewpoints wherever poetry is concerned and having these different interpretations is not wrong. The real problem arises when we start thinking of our way of reading poetry to be the only correct way. We need to realise that every person’s view is equally correct and every person’s perspective should be equally acknowledged. Sometimes it so happens that because of cultural references in the poem, it might become difficult for some people to relate to the art and hence their set of interpretation might be completely different. It should not be forgotten that just because a group is unable to get the foreign references, their way of thinking is in anyway incorrect. Constraints are very useful, but sometimes it’s nice to shake them off.