Reply #12: A poem is what it means to YOU. Period.

[aquart]

Yeah, sometimes it helps to take a class to get the wordplay. But I remember being so unhappy after a lecture on the meaning of some of Yeats' poems. I had known what they meant to me. Learning what they meant to the poet made them belong to him more than they belonged to me. And I didn't want to give them back.

Owen gives me chills but I don't know James Weldon Johnson at all.

If a poem "knocks your socks off," exactly what more can it be expected to do?

And if you're quoting Browning, (My Last Duchess is my mom's favorite poem)for heaven's sake, I DON'T SEE WHAT'S LACKING IN YOUR UNDERSTANDING!!!???

As for feeling competent to critique fiction but not poetry...maybe it's a logic difference? I dunno. I pretty much don't critique fiction. I know drama uses a dramatic logic, a logic of consequences: if you show a gun in the first act, you must fire it in the last act. But poetry is a logic of association (found also in prose fiction, news stories (damn them), and plays (like anything by August Wilson)) which works ...hmmm...by a cumulation of mental links. The best description of poetic logic I ever found was what Elton John did with Candle in the Wind for Princess Diana's funeral. He changed some words in the song to call her "England's rose." By choosing "rose" he selected a word with huge associative power. The rose was the flower of Aphrodite, Goddess of Love. It then was co-opted by Mary, Queen of Heaven (now you know what the rose window is for in all those cathedrals, and the rosary beads). Elizabeth I was referred to as England's rose (which makes the Temple Garden scene Henry VI part...one, I think...absolutely amazingly fraught...seems like a cute throwaway scene... but you can't trust Will with throwaway scenes, not at all) so with two words Elton John called the divorced and rejected Diana the Goddess of Love, the Queen of Heaven, AND the Queen of England. Which, to anyone witnessing the stunning reaction of the people, was right on the money.

THAT's poetic logic. It's what makes it possible for Jesus to be both the shepherd and the lamb. If fiction (which I spend no time analyzing so I don't know) uses a different logic, one which you more readily accept, that may be the problem. I am so making wild leaps here.

For a fictional explanation of poetic logic, I just remembered an old story of Charlotte Armstrong's called "The Weight of the Word."

(BTW, this is also why it's impossible for Oxford to have written Shakespeare's works. His "poetry" doesn't get that. It's technically competent stuff, but the words are all WYSIWYG, no extra weight.)