Maggie's Farm

What, so a poet has a license but not a reader? Don't go reading poetry in a poetic manner? The poet opened this Pandora's box in the first place. Does this sidestep into the domain of novels also? Novels are something I'm a little more familiar with, so forgive me if this seems a digression...Anna Karenina is a pet peeve of mine. The way I read the story, Anna is a not a sympathetic character, but then many "learned" literary perspectives I have seen portray her sympathetically. Yet as I understand it (the man's dead, so I gotta go with what I've seen repeated elsewhere) Tolstoy's own perspective was not sympathetic.

Perhaps my 10th grade English teacher was correct when she said it was acceptable for critics, professors, and teachers to find interpretations in novels that the authors insist were not intended...or perhaps she was wrong. I don't know. I do know that my calculus teacher was never wrong. Nor was the physics or chemistry teachers. OK, maybe they were once or twice, but when they were they had to admit it. Kind of humbling that way, I think.

Ah, but this is the post-modernist age. Methinks we gave up on meaning 30-40 years ago. Where has our Prof. Rip Van Winkle been? 'Twas a different time when riding in a Stutz Bear Cat,
poets studied rules of verse, and ladies rolled their eyes. Now it's all free form whatnot, so why berate the poor bastards that grew up in this pablum for their inability to stick to an alien program?