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Many people still think that high-flown, abstract words give greater resonance to their writing, but
vagueness is always a consequence of using abstract words. We would go further-abstractions should
be avoided because they verge on the meaningless. If you think of the word “sadness”, for example, all
you get is a blur in your head. If, on the other hand, you ransack your memory and fix on an experience
that was a truly sad one, and tell people about this experience, your listeners will not have to take your
word for it that you experienced sadness. They’ll know because you’ve shown them.
Here we can see enacted the aesthetic of the author as the final arbiter of meaning. Sweeney and Williams place value
only on the poet’s feelings. The reader, for them, is merely a passive witness to the poet’s experience of sadness. No
mention is made that perhaps the poem would be a better one if the reader were allowed to experience sadness as
well. But Sweeney and Williams know that for this to happen abstract words would have to be used, and that the
employment of such would limit the poet’s authority.
I have included this background material in order to put into context the main argument of this article. My main
contention is that the meaning of any written text, but in particular poetry, is ultimately decided upon by the
individual reader, either unconsciously or by volition. By “volition” I mean the conscious determination of the reader
to decide upon any one of a number of associations the words and phrases of any given sentence suggest, and to
choose this particular association as the constituent of meaning despite its being the less obvious or appropriate
choice (in comparison to the others) given the complete denotative meaning the sentence’s lexis implies. This sort of
practice is possible because the poetic text is without intentionality: both in the sense of having no meaning
inherently, and of the impossibility of its having an authorial intent conferred upon it.
In his essay ‘From Work to Text’ (1971), Roland Barthes describes the author as not being the main producer of the
text, or even in a position to be identified with it. He does not hold the commonsense view that the author is the
controlling factor in the production of language for the text. He sees the author as a product of the text, whose
presence is only one aspect, among many others, that comprise the text’s totality. To Barthes, literary texts are
systems of meaning that are comprised of multiple discourses that are multi-layered in their arrangement. Because
this multiplicity is irreducible to a single fixed meaning, a particular reading of a text may elevate one aspect and
privilege it as having a central meaning. Barthes views meaning as being engendered by language, and it is language
and experience that engenders meaning. The potential for a literary text to produce a multiplicity of meanings is
realised through the linguistic permutations available in the text, and subject to the reading context and the
individual reader. Viewed in this way, then, a text has a plurality of meaning, and is open to repeated readings and
interpretations.
This inability of the text as a source of stable and finite meanings is the reason that there has not emerged a
consensus in literary criticism. Instead, the history of literary criticism is one of diversity and change; in which
successive critics have offered radically different readings of the same work. The assumption that there is a meaning
embedded in the text and that it can be discerned at a single glance (as if the text was a clear window through which
meaning could be perceived directly, in some sort of total and categorical form) is simply not the case. When we read
a text we are not, as Stanley Fish points out in his essay ‘Interpreting the Variorum’ (1976), “simply reading”. For
Fish, “simply reading” is impossibility as it implies the possibility of disinterested perception: and, as we all know,
perception is anything but disinterested.
David Bleich, in Readings and Feelings (1978) and Subjective Criticism (1978), champions the creative powers of the
reader. He says that because ‘the object of observation appears changed by the act of observation, knowledge is
made by people and not found’. He believes writing about literature should not involve suppressing readers’
individual concerns, anxieties, passions and enthusiasms because ‘each person’s most urgent motivations are to
understand himself’. And as a response to a literary work always helps us find out something about ourselves,
introspection and spontaneity are to be encouraged. Every act of response, he says, reflects the shifting motivations
and perceptions of the reader at the moment of reading, and even the most idiosyncratic and autobiographical
response to the text should be heard sympathetically. In this way the reader is able to construct, or create, a personal
exegesis by utilizing the linguistic permutations inherent in the text to construct units of meaning constituted from a
predominantly autobiographical frame of reference.
The bulk of modern mainstream poetry is no longer about reader identification but about author communication.
These poems are written merely to convey the poet’s thoughts and feelings about a specific event, situation or place
he or she has experienced. The poet is not necessarily concerned with whether the reader is moved or not by the
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