The Pleasure of Ambiguity

I must admit I have always hated reading in high school English class—yet I enjoy reading poetry. Every time I am assigned readings in class, I dreaded it because I was basically forced to read books that were boring and were not interesting at all. What made it worst was that I was then expected to reiterate what my teacher thought was the “correct” interpretation of the text in some term paper or creative presentation. Believe me, I felt like I was pleasing my teacher’s ego more than learning how critically analyze English literature.

My love for poetry began when I realized poetry only takes a fraction of the time to read and comprehend compared to the other forms of literature that I was required to read in school such as novels, short stories, and plays. Naturally, as I read more and more poems, I adored it. Not because it was easy to understand, but instead, because it was concise. Rather than flipping through 400 pages to reach a final conclusion on the message the author is trying to convey, a poet is able to express the exact topic in just a few words or lines. Moreover, whenever I am reading poetry, I feel no pressure at all to believe that my teacher’s interpretation is absolutely correct, because with poetry, there are infinite ways to perceive and interpret those lines. With every word, every symbol, and every image the poet chooses, they all can mean something different base on your own personal interpretations. To truly understand a poem and bring the poets words to life, it really involves the whole of the reader including their senses, emotions, and imagination. Through this, poetry is able to communicate an experience or emotion in such a creative way that it moves us fervently and intensifies our knowledge towards human life.

Despite my love for poetry, I find it rather unfortunate that there are a lot of students I know who hate poetry. Perhaps it is because they see it as yet another task they must complete in order to pass the course. Often times, I would hear my classmate say something along the lines of: “I hate poetry, it is so hard to read and understand.” What I have concluded is that maybe they hate it because they are afraid of being wrong, or taking the risk of challenging their teachers. As I learned from one of my favorite poems, “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost, to really enjoy anything in life, one must be willing to take on risks and admit that we do not hold the answers to everything. Like poetry, life is ambiguous.