Poetry according to Perrine

When first reading Perrine's thoughts on interpreting poetry, I didn't really agree with him or understand what point that Perrine was presenting. I enjoy personal interpretation when reading things. In my opinion, literature or even poetry is enjoyable because of the freedom to think and interpret for oneself. I always became frustrated when a teacher would grade a question that dealt with interpretation and then mark it wrong. I think that interpretation is open to more than just one specific thing. When reading a story, an author does write for a purpose, however, the reader is entitled to think what they want to think, right? I do understand what Perrine means though. When one has to really analyze poetry or any type of literature, there are certain things that make interpretation right and wrong. We, as readers, cannot just think that anything and everything is correct. Some poems can have multiple meanings, but that doesn't mean that we can interpret anything we want from them. 


When I  re-read the poems and picked up on how they were to be correctly analyzed, I began to see what Perrine meant. (especially with the Emily Dickinson poem) Yes, it is true that a garden can be inferred and imagined from the words written, but analytically there is much more than just a garden. It makes sense to see that Dickinson is describing a sunset. The meaning of the poem to be a sunset is much more compatible and appropriate with every single word and detail. I think that this is a good example of how to analyze and interpret poems throughout this next quarter. There can be a lot more to poem beyond the surface. It is easy to say that a poem may be describing a sunset, but through analyzing every single detail, the correct interpretation becomes apparent to the reader. Also, from reading Perrine's thoughts, I have come to see that looking past literal interpretation is sometimes important in poetry. I think it will be difficult to correctly interpret and analyze poems in this way. It seems as if it if will take really observant, attentive people to pick up on the details and learn to connect and interpret in this way...