Meaning and Ideas

1. Meaning and Ideas

2. 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

3. Total meaning • The experience it communicates in a poem

4. 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.

5. 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

6. 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.

7. 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

8. 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