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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.
I was a literature major. I enjoy reading but can't match the encyclopedic range of reading of many I used to know. One past girlfriend in grad school it seems had read everything, and took pains to remind people of this, though I suspect that had something to do with her having been transplanted from a high-performing, competitive undergraduate program on the east coast to my unassuming program in the south full of relative dullards like myself. My beerswilling, football-watching friends tolerated her (but only just) because she was exceptionally beautiful.
I enjoy reading and I like more poetry than is probably considered healthy by most people; I have committed a few sonnets of Shakespeare to memory, can quote Roethke, and have attended more than one poetry reading without even getting a little drowsy.
Still, of all my classes, literature classes were often the worst, unless the teacher himself was charismatic enough to hold my interest (I say he only because none of my female literature profs ever really connected with me). Reading your post about the gout interpretation makes me recoil in what is the effete version of PTSD, where I recall the similar highspeed intellectual wheelspinning of many of my lit classes, perhaps especially poetry classes.
Having been an assigned a Burgess essay on Shakespeare, I remember going into class and the professor (another transplant, but from the west coast, and this was to be, for me, the highlight of her class) asked us if, on reading Burgess' suggestion that Shakespeare was partial author of the KJV of the bible, any of us looked up the relevant passage?
Dullards all, no one had. Her response, that echoes to this day: "Well FUCK YOU!"
I say with no trace of sarcasm that I was not fortunate enough to have as many teachers of her spirit. Even she, after this one outburst ( and a subsequent dropping of her course by many Alpha Chi and other sorority girls) became much more dry and uninteresting as a lecturer.
Psalm 46, by the way.
Edited for clarity
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