Re:The Most Misread Poem in America
by vidarh on Saturday September 12, 2015 @07:18AM
(#10207810)
There's an anecdote, that I've been unable to verify, about an interview with a famous Norwegian writer (well, famouns in Norway) where the interviewer - a literature critic - went on and on about the symbolism of a scene in one of the authors books where some women are washing some clothes. Really ripping the scene to shreds word for words and assigning all kinds of meanings to every little choice. And then he asked the author for confirmation, basically.
Whereupon said author thought about it for a bit and told the interviewer something to the effect that he thought that was fantastic, and wish he'd thought of all of those things, but he'd just thought the image was nice.
When at school I got exasperated by the same thing, as I wrote a lot of poetry at that age, and for me it was all about the imagery and emotions it evoked. Anyone who'd tried to analyse symbolism in any of what I wrote would have already missed the point. You might find something in there, but it would not have been "mine". And generally I feel that while you may pick up on some interesting things now and again, you also lose a lot when you start picking everything apart. Analysis got close to killing my interest in literature.
The one time I wrote something intentionally full of symbols, it was a sarcastic response to analysis, with a very clear message to my Norwegian teacher about what I thought about analysing poems. He didn't appreciate it (the rest of my class did, though - it's the only time anyone applauded a poem in any of my classes..)
Doesn't mean that there aren't authors that delight in putting symbolism into their works, or who does it subconsciously, of course, but to me it greatly reduces my pleasure in reading to look for it.
Whereupon said author thought about it for a bit and told the interviewer something to the effect that he thought that was fantastic, and wish he'd thought of all of those things, but he'd just thought the image was nice.
When at school I got exasperated by the same thing, as I wrote a lot of poetry at that age, and for me it was all about the imagery and emotions it evoked. Anyone who'd tried to analyse symbolism in any of what I wrote would have already missed the point. You might find something in there, but it would not have been "mine". And generally I feel that while you may pick up on some interesting things now and again, you also lose a lot when you start picking everything apart. Analysis got close to killing my interest in literature.
The one time I wrote something intentionally full of symbols, it was a sarcastic response to analysis, with a very clear message to my Norwegian teacher about what I thought about analysing poems. He didn't appreciate it (the rest of my class did, though - it's the only time anyone applauded a poem in any of my classes..)
Doesn't mean that there aren't authors that delight in putting symbolism into their works, or who does it subconsciously, of course, but to me it greatly reduces my pleasure in reading to look for it.