Poetry, Poets, Interpretations - What Do They Bring?

The view on poetry and the involvement of its author in it have obviously changed throughout history. Thus, from the legacy of Romanticism, poetry stands for spontaneous emotion, expressing the poetic ego. Poets are the unknown and unacknowledged legislators of the world and they can represent personal sorrows and melancholic feelings in a public environment. According to symbolists, poetry stands for a pure art form which is closest to music. Later on, from a formalist perspective, poetry is nothing else but a form, which distinguishes it from other linguistic media and makes it the most literary genre.

There are several types of imagery included in poetry, such as simile, symbol, metaphor, metonymy and so on. Metaphor can cover many aspects. Thus, it can be habitual in everyday speech (the conduit metaphor or the "dead" metaphor); it is also a tool of communication. The sign is composed of the signifier (what it is said) and the signified (what it means), according to Ferdinand de Saussure. Because there is no agreed reality, we can say that all kinds of language can operate in a figurative sense, there is only a conventional relationship between signifier and signified.

Metaphor has the potential of creating new language, as it can comprise an abundance of meanings and subtleties. It can also act as a means of reification (turning a concept into an object). Such is the case of the symbols, which can be either culturally accepted symbols (like for instance the cross, etc), or poetic symbols (which can be complex, obscure or ambiguous).

With the appearance of structuralism and post-structuralism, the autonomy of the text is emphasized rather than privileging the author, who can be found within his poetic discourse. The act of using the poet can have a restrictive effect on the poem's meaning and deny the idea that a poem can mean different things for different people in different historical instances. If we are to interpret poetry in terms of sincerity and authorship, the result would not be a creative response but rather a mere historical reconstruction. In the case of the implied author (a term which is rather used in prose), the presence of the author is recognized in the text but there is a distinction between that presence and the actual poet. The implied author implies the selection, the filtering and the transfiguring of personal experiences.

The classic approach to poetry as an expression of the poet's feelings has the effect of limiting the ways in which the poem might exist as objective knowledge (vs. the traditional, Romantic emphasis on subjectivity). From another perspective, one could say that the poem is a linguistic object, a machine rather than a mirror, a window: at most, it is an objectification of feelings, not the feelings themselves.

T.S. Eliot for instance speaks about the necessity to find an "objective correlative" which can be either a set of objects, or a certain circumstance which can become the formula for a certain emotion (a symbol). This allows the reader to assess the poem in a more detached manner.

There are two types of poetry reading: the first one would be that of reading the poem for something - "the intentional fallacy" (as C. Beardsley puts it), and reading poetry as a special language, paying attention to the special use of language in poetry, the desire to see just the poem, without its interpretation - "the heresy of paraphrase" (C. Brooks). With respect to the second type of poetry reading mentioned above, we could say that the intention of the poet is neither available nor desirable; it would exist only if the poem is written to provide a point of comparison with something outside it.

According to the American poet named Ezra Pound, a fundamental distinction should be made between poems that can be read and poems that cannot be read. There is a particular type of poetry that is quite close to visual arts, in fact a sort of bridge between verbal language and painting or photography. Such are the picture poems. In their case, the visual element plays an important part, but it is not indispensable for properly understanding the poem. In fact, the layout of the poem is meant to reinforce the experience of the poem.