Some readers, mostly students, young naïve readers, or beginning poetry readers, think that a poem can mean anything you want it to mean.
This Idea Defies All Reason
Can an article about potted plants mean cookbooks are colorful picture books? Can a song about spring mean fall is harvest time? Can the painting of Mona Lisa mean the fall of Icarus was a sad event? Can Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun, mean horses make the landscape more beautiful? Of course not. So how is it that a poem can mean anything you want it to?
If this claim were accurate, there would no need for more than one poem. If a poem can mean anything, then you can want it to mean something different each time you read it.
Hughes and Owen, the Same?
Langston Hughes’ poem, “Harlem: A Dream Deferred,” dramatizes through rhetorical questions the possible effects of having to postpone one’s aspirations, but what if you want it to dramatize a soldier's reaction to mustard gas during World War I?
You would be claiming that Hughes’ poem is the same as Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.”
Lazy Thinkers
Misunderstanding poems may begin in high school as some teachers abdicate the responsibility of teaching how poetry works, allowing students to believe anything they wish about the meaning of a poem.
It is much easier to let student believe what they want to believe than to challenge them and guide them to learn to think and reason based on actual evidence.
Unfortunately, this kind of lazy thinking does not apply only to the study of poetry, but I leave that problem to others. If you are one of those unfortunates who believes that poetry can mean anything you want it to mean, please take my free course in eight lessons on Understanding Poetry.
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