by Neal Whitman, Poetry Prof
In 1954, pop group Crew Cuts* gave it a shot. Ah, the Meaning of Life! Why are we here? Where are we going? Do I have to change planes in Atlanta? Poets weigh in. We can begin and end with Homer’s The Iliad:
Insignificant mortals, who are as leaves are, and now flourish and grow warm with life, and feed on what the ground gives, but then again fade away and are dead.
I am not going to take on the meaning of it all, but how about the meaning of poetry? This question was prompted by the letters to the editor the June issue of Poetry. In April, this magazine had printed explanations by poets along side their poems.
In the two-month lag time, we heard from two kinds of readers in their “letters to the editor.” In one group, there are thank you letters, as in, “opens new dimensions to the reader, at least to this reader,” “helped me enjoy (the poems),” “very helpful for those of us who are not professional poets,” “keep producing issues with the poets’ explanations,” and “absolutely loved the explanations.” One reader specifically appreciated the “possible meaning(s)” that were offered by the poets.”
Then we heard from the ingrates: total rejection of the notion that poets explaining the meaning of their poems was a step in the right direction. To wit, “It was a bit insulting to have it explained,” and “a distraction from the main event (reading the poem!).” One letter-writer, tongue-in-cheek, suggested that the magazine stop printing the poems: “Just print the explications and your readers can imagine the poems for themselves.”
The impetus to let poets explain the meaning of their poems also is shared by another pillar of the po-biz establishment, American Poetry Review. There poets are offered a “The Poet on the Poem” column to accompany their poetry. In the May-June issue, Polish poet Tadeusz Dabrowski wrote that he declined to explain his poetry because he agreed with fellow Polish poet Rozwicz who declared, “I write so that I don’t have to speak.” Dabrowski added that his poems are not “homework assignments.” Here I am reminded of my high school English teacher, Miss Terry, who asked us what we thought the poet meant by his poem, “The Road Not Taken,” as if Robert Frost was not sure, but needed us to explain it to him.
Here is a twist. While I rail against teachers who put front and center the “What does it mean?” question, maybe poets do not always know what they mean. A poet I greatly admire, David Young, in “Landscape with Bees,” [At the Window] wrote this stanza:
Each poem’s not exactly what
you mean
because, of course,
you don’t
quite even know —
What do I profess? Explication along side the poem? Put me down for “No Thank You.” I believe that Dabrowski’s “Readers, don’t ask; Poets don’t tell” policy is the way to go. He wrote that “meaning” of a poem is written into it “as the wind-tossed crown of a tree is written into its seed.”
Let’s leave the last word to Archibald MacLeish (from Ars Poetica) :
A poem should not mean
But be
post scriptum: After I finished this essay, I was perusing the poetry section of a local used bookshop and came across a little item I just had to buy: The Flight of the Hawk, a limited edition monograph published to inaugurate the opening of Tor House to the public on October 6, 1979. [Readers of my 1st of the month feature may know by now that I am a volunteer docent at this stone house built for poet Robinson Jeffers in 1919. Jeffers apprenticed himself to the stonemason and subsequently built the 40 foot Hawk Tower by himself.] The author of this booklet, Alfred E. Smith, a neighbor and friend of Jeffers, wrote that he was appalled by library shelves full of books purporting to analyze what the Poet of Tor House “really meant.”