Reading Poems

Thanks for sharing the URL, and your thoughts! At the beginning of part II of the essay, Strand writes, "One might think that my ability to analyze and comment on the technique by which "you, Andrew Marvell" asserts its particular hold on the reader would alter my response to the poem. But my response now is pretty much what it was then." For me, this raises an old chicken-and-egg question. Certainly one's analysis of a poem is colored by initial response...Might not Strand have analyzed the poem differently if it had first viscerally hit him in a different way? Of course poetic analysis can never be objective...and shouldn't be. Analysis reveals as much about the reader as about the poet and the poem.