The Meaning of a Poem

I've been musing about the act of writing poetry as of late. I sat down to pen a couple while fidgety at a conference. But what are the meanings of these poems? This got me thinking about the meaning of writing in general. I know many have brought up this topic, and I haven't really read them, but here are some of my own naïve musings on the matter.

The gut instinct for many is to refer to authorial intent. But, I noticed that even when I had penned a poem with a very specific situation in mind, I could also take the poem and look at in in other lights expressing other matters. Are these matters any less "meant" by the poem, even though they were not what I had intended? Perhaps to an extent, but even I, the author, with full knowledge of authorial intent, want to say that there is meaning exceeding what I had thought.

So, is it about the reader's response? But different responses could be better or worse, and so this cannot be constitutive of the meaning. Some responses take into account more of the poem, for example, while others are more persuasive for one reason or another.

I would hold that a better place to locate meaning is in the poem itself. More coherent responses from the reader which take into account more of the poem are better responses because they more accurately represent the object which is the poem. Maybe more powerful and persuasive interpretations are the same. Whatever I had intended as the author is certainly one of these, but there may be other coherent ways of approaching the poem as well which are legitimate. The poem is a concrete object really existing (in a way) in the world and every interpretation of it will give a different perspective of it. A multitude of perspectives, no matter what the source, can coexist, since the poem is an object standing outside of us. Language exceeds both the author and the reader.

Of course, this view has its own problems. What is the poetic object? If I change a word, is it still the same poem? How about when language itself has changed in the next couple hundred years, or in a different community? Is a translation still the same poem? I think that at this point, it is easiest to say that the poem is a pragmatic object; I can consider it as an individual object for practical reasons and really work with reality in this way, but it is not ultimately speaking and apart from certain uses an individual object. This does not mean it is not real; it means that a full description of its reality must include a complex network of interrelations, and the poem itself is an ill-defined and fuzzy (but actual) region of this network.

Another way of thinking about the place of a poem is on the level of mathematical objects (as much as non-mathematicians may balk at the idea). What is the number 2? Is it this quantity of boxes, or that of books? Is it a measurement, capable of being divided as many times as I please, or a count, which only comprises this individual and that? Is it the start of the prime numbers? Is it a symbol with relatively little meaning other than the fact that it does not have a rational root? Even if the number arises in a concrete setting, say, in my count of how many boxes are in front of me, this does not exhaust the meaning of "2". Each of these other meanings are also in a way included implicitly, and new applications and branches of mathematics can expand the meaning of (or at least our awareness of the meaning of) "2". "2" is a mathematical entity which is its own objective reality even while having meaning in various contexts.

The difference is that I have no problem considering "2" as a real object; unlike the poem, "2" and other mathematical entities are very clearly and precisely defined. Something is two, or it is not, and if there happens to be any ambiguity then it resides in the question instead of the entity "2". So, maybe we can metaphorically consider math as the "discrete" version of that which poetry (and perhaps language in general) is a "continuous" version; I can pick out the mathematical objects (even in talking about "continuous" phenomena like the real numbers or functions) one by one, while all attempts to do so with language must flow into "surrounding" objects.