I once found a poem that poleaxed me with its entire self, which was several pages long. It was so beautiful thatI did not think about it. I just thought it, over and over again. It never occurred to me that it had any meaning, no more than a sunset has meaning. I loved the poem so much that I used it as a method of keeping time. “I will wait,” I would tell myself, “for one or two or three recitals of it.” I never managed to learn the whole poem, because it was several pages long, and because its beauty made me so restless that I had to go out and find more.
And then came the day that my teacher, in passing, and apropos of nothing that I could ever see, asked me, “What do you think it means?” I had no answer for that, and watched as my beautiful crystal word-globe of poem shattered around my feet.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
So I still get upset when people try to look at poems as though they were some sort of algebraic equation that both needed and required solving. Because of this, I usually don’t read criticism about poetry, but now (probably also because of this) I have gotten hold of Harold Bloom’s The Best Poems of the English Language.
I am thinking about poems again. I am going to read a bit of Milton. All of “Lycidas” is in that book. Sounds like a logical place to begin.
Technorati Tags: Lycidas, poem, poetry, T. S. Eliot
white pebble 