ENGL 325

Excerpt from John Ciardi, “How Does a Poem Mean?”

W.H. Auden was once asked what advice he would give a young man who wished to become a poet.  Auden replied that he would ask the young man why he wanted to write poetry.  If the answer was “because I have something important to say,” Auden would conclude that there was no hope for that young man as a poet.  If on the other hand the answer was something like “because I like to hang around words and overhear them talking to one another,” then that young man was at least interested in a fundamental part of the poetic process and there was hope for him.

When one “message-hunts” a poem (i.e. goes through the poem with no interest except in its paraphrasable content) he is approaching the writing as did the young man with “something important to say.” . . . The common question from which such an approach begins is “WHAT Does the Poem Mean?”  His mind closed on that point of view, the reader tends to “interpret” the poem rather than to experience it, seeking only what he can make over from it into a prose statement (or Examination answer) and forgetting in the process that it was originally a poem. . . .

For WHAT DOES THE POEM MEAN? is too often a self-destroying approach to poetry.  A more useful way of asking the question is HOW DOES A POEM MEAN?  Why does it build itself into a form out of images, ideas, rhythms?  How doe these elements become the meaning?  How are they inseparable from the meaning?  As Yeats wrote:

O body swayed to music, O quickening glance,

How shall I tell the dancer from the dance?

What the poem is, is inseparable from its own performance of itself.  The dance is in the dancer and the dancer is in the dance.