Poetry & Other Arts

I am taking a course on "Introduction to Literature" and it seems that poetry and many other arts are really two distinct and separate things: the object of art as created by the artist, and that object as observed and interpreted by the viewer.

The poet / artist may not be conscious of all that is going into her/his creation. They put in what feels right to them. There is not always conscious analysis of every detail.

The viewer now looks at this object (or listens in the case of music) and tries to interpret every nuance, jot and tittle. I cannot help but think that this object acts as a mirror, and what the viewer sees reflects more about the viewer than the artist. A Rorschach test may be a better analogy, as the blots are designed to be meaningless in themselves. Everything we see is from within ourselves.

We are doing a paper analyzing a poet of our choice and I worry that I am reading too much into this. We will be graded not so much on getting the "right" ideas, but on getting "some" ideas and being able to justify those ideas with quotes from the poetry. In a sense, everything is true if you can make a case for it. If we ask what the poet meant, we don't know -- we only have the poem to work with.

Last semester I took "Critical Thinking" and my instructor would get furious at the idea that everything was true. (He had other issues as well.) I see his point but here we have a different concept of what is truth means. In my mind I capitalize Truth when I use it in certain ways.

Well, back to William Carlos Williams. Have a good day!