Perrine Poetry Reasoning.

I came into this reading thinking that poetry really has near infinite interpretations, but Perrine has somewhat changed my opinion. He states that there indeed can be multiple correct interpretations of a poem, but there is always one interpretation "relies on the fewest assumptions not grounded in the poem itself" (Paragraph 4) and is therefore the most economical. A correct analysis of a poem would provide a detail for every part of the poem, leaving no word undeciphered. The way he describes how his class interpreted the Dickinson poem much like how I did made me feel knowledgeable. However, he proves me to be incorrect and actually quite impressed by his own analysis. For me, daffodil triggered the image of flowers, and my interpretation completely revolved around that one nugget of information. Perrine points out that the interpretation could make sense, but assumptions must be made for it to be correct. That is why his conjecture of a sunset truly is the perfect analysis for the poem.

I do have one issue with this way of understanding poetry. That is that the interpretation may take ages to uncover. Unless someone spends most of their evening staring at sunsets, they wouldn't immediately think of one when reading the word purple or yellow. Nor would they jump to the conclusion of clouds when reading the word ships, or think of the sky when seeing the word wharf. The only way to completely and correctly understand a poem is to think of multiple scenarios of what the poem could be describing. Any preconceptions one might have going into a poem must be discarded. Without a trigger word to relate to sun, a sunset, dusk, etc., the reader may never arrive at the conclusion of a beautiful description of a sunset. Poetry also tries to trick the reader, making it even harder to pass this class  understand poetry, as illustrated by the pair of army poems. The reader gets the idea that both poems are related to war in some way, but the second poem is about stars. STARS?! How is any logical-thinking person supposed to unravel that mystery? Looking back, I understand that constellations could be the main focus of the poem, but that would not be my top five interpretations. Perrine basically states that poetry is hard, and you have to be an excellent analyzer to have a perfectly correct interpretation.