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Notes -
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.
Well, I'm of the opinion that the 'intended meaning' of a poem or piece of media is totally worthless and uninteresting. The very best art taps into aesthetics or concepts that are to some extent transcendent of their contingent features. Some authorial context can be illuminating, but that's all it is - an aid to understand the text.
If that is so, you could very well just entertain yourself with a random word generator like Terry A. Davis, no?
I don't necessarily disagree! Those concepts should in principle be discernible however, and above the "noise floor" of the random associations I'd label "schizo". I don't deny that there might be interesting unconscious features of works, just critiquing the tendency of critics to find signals in random noise.
There's a concept in literature analysis called "death of the author" where they only care about what was written, not whatever the author intended.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathOfTheAuthor
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You could, if the random word generator produced something interesting, but they rarely do. Humans are much better at this.
I suppose that in general I think it uninteresting and futile to figure out what exactly other people think. Shelley is dead, his words remain, and if he meant east but wrote west, west is what's on the page. The greatest authority on what the text means is not the author, but the text itself.
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