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Chapter Six - The Meaning of a Poem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2019

Michael Ferber
Affiliation:
University of New Hampshire
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Summary

A poem means what the poet meant. That is the briefest way to state a widely held belief, taken as indisputable common sense by most ordinary readers and many literary critics. We understand and interpret a poem by inferring the intention of the poet who wrote it. That is how we understand ordinary speech-acts – people communicate what is in their minds to other people – and that is how we understand the speech-act we call a poem. Without the anchor of the poet’s intention, we go adrift, subject to any passing wind or wave, and there is no other anchor. It is true that we often have no external evidence of a poet’s purposes. We know little of any consequence about William Shakespeare, for example – so little that many otherwise intelligent scholars have convinced themselves that somebody else wrote his works. About Homer, we know nothing at all: he may not even have existed, being only a name attached to a long tradition of oral bards. In these cases, the anchor is merely notional, and its chain weak, but when we meet difficult passages, we nonetheless do our best to imagine what Shakespeare and “Homer” must have intended in order to rule out our own subjective associations and limit our susceptibility to the currents and tides of voguish literary theory.

Type
Chapter
Information
Poetry and Language
The Linguistics of Verse
, pp. 142 - 194
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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  • The Meaning of a Poem
  • Michael Ferber, University of New Hampshire
  • Book: Poetry and Language
  • Online publication: 02 October 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108554152.006
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  • The Meaning of a Poem
  • Michael Ferber, University of New Hampshire
  • Book: Poetry and Language
  • Online publication: 02 October 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108554152.006
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The Meaning of a Poem
  • Michael Ferber, University of New Hampshire
  • Book: Poetry and Language
  • Online publication: 02 October 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108554152.006
Available formats
×