Meaning and Ideas
Meaning and Ideas
• The meaning of a poem is the experience
it expresses.
• The readers want something they can
grasp entirely with their minds.
• A poem has prose meaning and total
meaning
Total meaning
• The experience it communicates in a
poem
Prose meaning
• The prose meaning will not necessarily or
perhaps even usually be an idea.
• It may be a story, a description, a
statement of emotion, a presentation of
human character, or some combination of
these.
Ideas in prose meaning
• Message hunters will be disappointed by
poetry with prose meaning, for they will not
find what they are looking for, and they
may attempt to read some idea into the
poem that is really not there
Ideas
• Ideas are also part of human experience, and
therefore many poems are concerned, at least
partially, with presenting ideas.
• The idea in a poem is only part of the total
experience that it communicates.
• The value and worth of the poem are
determined by the value of the total experience,
not by the truth or the nobility of the idea itself.
Ideas
• A good idea alone will not make a good poem,
nor need an idea with which the reader does not
agree ruin one
• Good readers of poetry are receptive to all kinds
of experience
• We must feel that the idea has been truly and
deeply felt by the poet, and that the poet is doing
something more than merely moralizing
Ideas
• Good readers naturally will, and properly
should, value more highly the poem whose
idea they feel to be more mature and
nearer to the heart of human experience