Interpretations

I noticed that to each person on this blog, the poems have held slightly different meanings. In Eagleton's Literary Theory, he begs the question that we are all reading different literary works even though they are all comprised of the same words. Stanley Fish derived that literature is in a sense the sum of its interpretations. The question is what is being interpreted: the text itself or something imminent that is waiting to be discovered.

Text cannot be made to mean anything, but "the stock of socially legitimated ways of reading works … operates as a constraint" (76). There are probably extreme outliers in how a reader interprets "the boys i mean". Those outliers should be taken into consideration, but probably 95% of the population can rationally agree on the merit of certain interpretations. The extra 5% either fall into the genius or crazy category.