Some thoughts on the papers

Hey everybody,

A few things came up in office hours today that I'd like to clear up. So...

1) A number of you were worried that if you decided to write on one of the poems, you might "get it wrong," since your interpretation or reading of the poem wouldn't be the same one Claudia or I might come up with. As far as we're concerned, there is no right or wrong way to read a poem (or the Nietzsche or Freud, for that matter). Lots of people have come up with different interpretations of everything we've read in class up to this point, some of which are quite different from the ones we've been laying out. You are more than welcome, if not outright encouraged, to do some digging and figure out what you think any of the poems or essays mean. Be creative. Be bold. Be original. We don't care if your readings accord with ours - in fact, we'd be thrilled to learn something new.

What you do want to do, however, is be smart. And that means you need to back up your reading with evidence from the poems. That is to say, a less convincing reading isn't necessarily one that disagrees with either of our interpretations (even the ones we've been working through in class), but one that isn't supported by the poems themselves. There are no right or wrong answers here, but there are more or less convincing readings - your job is not get things "right" but to be persuasive. By all means disagree with me (or Claudia!), but make sure that when you do you support your argument with actual evidence.

2) If you're going to choose option #3, you should feel free to use almost any of the poems we've given out. I say "almost" because I've decided to not let people write about Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." Despite all I said above about there being no right or wrong readings, to my mind the quite common interpretation of the poem - that the poem celebrates choosing the less conventional option - is absolutely incorrect. By which I mean that it's not supported at all by the poem itself (for what it's worth, Frost himself called that poem "a wolf in sheep's clothing"). Since we didn't discuss that poem in class, I'd be very worried that this common interpretation would be the one you worked with. Which would be a problem. So choose any poem (how about "The Innocence"?) but that one.

Good luck!