Reply to comment

In our second class, Professor Dalke made a point about whether telling someone what a poem is about will close off their ability to interpret the poem in their own way (at least I think she was arguing in the affirmative for this).  At first I agreed with this statement.  As someone who had never read the Captain poem before, I was trying to figure out what the poem meant when someone in the class told us all it was about Lincoln.  When the student said that, I gave up on trying to work through my own analysis and just accepted the Lincoln story. The simple explanation that the poem was about Lincoln did close my mind off to finding meaning in the poem in my own way.

But as we began to further discuss what it happens when someone tells you what a poem means, I thought back to an English teacher I had in my junior year of high school.  In that class we read "Song of Myself" (also by Walt Whitman...I see now that there is a lot of Whitman in my life), and our paper assignment for that unit was to take one of the stanzas and write a thesis paper analyzing  it to find it's meaning.  Well, I was completely stumped.  At that point in my life, I had no patience for finding meaning from poetr.  I preferred narratives and long sentences to "abstract"combinations of words, which is what I felt poetry was.  I went in to see him for help, because I had gotten almost nowhere on my own.  He presented me with what he thought the stanza was about.  I could have written my paper trying to write towards his conclusion, but he then did something which still stands in my mind as one of the best examples of teaching I have ever encountered - he took me through the stanza, pointing out what made him believe that his conclusion about what was being said was the valid conclusion.  This was the first time I was taught how to actually find meaning in a poem, and it made reading the poem more exciting and rewarding because I was able to see how Whitman was able to get a point across in his poetry.  After going through the stanza with my teacher, I realized that I did not agree with his interpretation of the meaning.  I was then able to write a paper that went in a different direction in an intelligent way (by proving my point through my own personal analysis of the poem, modeled after what he showed me).

After remembering about this English teacher and my experiences with poetry in his class, I was hesitant to agree with the idea that hearing someone else's interpretation closes off other interpretations.  It often helps me to use someone else's interpretation as a starting point to my own ideas about a poem. After all, I'm still not very patient with poetry, and it's difficult for me to come up with meaning to a poem all on my own.  But it is also true that explaining the meaning of a poem can close off someone's mind, as I became closed off to the Captain poem after hearing it was written about Lincoln.  I think the difference between the two scenarios is twofold: first, my English teacher showed me where his interpretation came from whereas in class I was simply told, and secondly I think I was more interested in  "Song of Myself"than the Captain poem.  I think this can apply to science as well.  The way to get people interested in your findings or interpretations of a certain issue is to present in a way that not only clearly lays out your own logic, but leaves the whole conclusion up for revision later on.  Without explaining, one could come across as condescending, and a lot of people close off and become defensive and unreceptive when they are confronted with that tone (well maybe I am being to general here; I myself close off when someone explains things to me in a condescending way and I am assuming that other people respond the same way).