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Is anyone else interested in poetry here?
A thing I've noticed in poetry analysis that annoys me is what I've come to think of as "schizo" interpretations.
On the one hand, you have symbolism that was likely put into the text intentionally; e.g. in "Ozymandias" (which I assume you are familiar with) the famous "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" can be very reasonably interpreted as the onlooker ironically despairing that even the greatest ruler will eventually decline and be forgotten.
On the other hand you have stuff like "Scholars such as professors Nora Crook and Newman White have viewed the work as critical of Shelley's contemporaries George IV, with the statue's legs a coded reference to the then Prince Regent's gout". How reasonable is this interpretation? I think not very; if the poem had instead referred to the statue's arms or something, would there have been another possible tenuous interpretation to some other person or concept? Probably. You would need some sort of Bayesian intuition for this, as there is a "base rate" of possible random associations you could make – and for any connection less credible than that you're basically finding patterns in random noise.
It reminds me of how the famous schizophrenic programmer Terry Davis would "speak to God"; he had a random number generator that spat out words, and he'd do free associations between them. Textual criticism is rife with this. I suspect it's because there is really no incentive to find out the "truth" of a text, just finding cool associations that makes the reader look smart, and since there's no ground truth to verify anything it easily gets disassociated from reality.
To "fix" this, I propose a calibration game of sorts. One would write a text with actual symbolism and poetic devices, then publishing both the text and a canonical explanation for everything in it. Readers could then interpret it, and afterwards find out how much their interpretation missed the mark. If anyone wants to try this, I have done so with one of my old poems here.
(For the unfamiliar with meter, it's written in straightforward iambic tetrameter, i.e. each line consists of four pairs of unstressed-stressed syllables; with an ABAB rhyme scheme.)
"The Prince"
"The Prince", canonical analysis.
This actually reminds me when I had to read Heart of Darkness in highschool. We were asked what Kurtz meant when he said "The horror, the horror". Naturally, the correct and encouraged answers all had to do with colonialism. I said Kurtz was such an obvious amoral sociopath that "the horror" was that he could be laid low. Given everything we learned about him, all the terrible things he'd done big and small without a thought in the world. Often being praised as a genius for them. Why the sudden deathbed confession? No, I thought "the horror" to him was that he was a great man and he was dying in the middle of nowhere with nothing.
Naturally this was the wrong answer.
How was the “incorrectness” of your answer communicated to you in that class?
It was 20+ years ago. But from what I recall just the teacher trying to get me to shut up a few words in and passive aggressively moving onto the next person.
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