are we really evaluating the poem?

Many times, my evaluation of a poem is based my mood or my personal beliefs; reading “The Waste Land” while mentally fatigued wore me out and gave me a horrible first impression of the poem, but upon re-reading in the morning and discussing the poem in class, I found myself intrigued. The idea of relative meaning, based not on the text but on the reader’s unique mindset, with all its transient circumstantial variations, really chips at the concept of an absolute standard against which to measure the true quality of a poem. Not to say my evaluation is so biased as to be useless in an absolute sense, but I can understand how someone else, under different circumstances, could have a radically different yet equally valid take on any given poem.

The problem then becomes how I justify my own criteria of evaluation; structural variants cannot have an impact on whether the poem is “good” or “bad,” because the length of a poem, the presence or absence of punctuation, defined meter, or rhyme scheme, the theme, and the imagery are all simply icing on the cake; the quality of the grammar or structure is not what we have been asked to evaluate – we don’t care whether the poem is well-written. We care whether the poem is “good,” and to a reader that is a purely subjective idea. There cannot be objective criteria, or absolute criteria, for this evaluation. Objective criteria can be used to show how the author develops his point, and can describe the basic theme itself, but the reader’s interpretation of that theme is what defines the quality of the poem.

I can appreciate the style with which many poems are written; that does not mean I think they are good. I will only re-read those poems I like, in the sense that just being ‘well-written’ is not enough to make me pick up a poem again; therefore, when I attempt to describe what makes a good poem, I should refrain from defining my criteria based on an absolute standard. I felt a poem like “Thanatopsis” read well because just before starting my essay I was looking through “The Waste Land”; i.e. I was really in the mood to have things laid out clearly – being sick and tired of the constant allusion, constant metaphorical reference, and constant vagueness – that’s what made “Thanatopsis” a good poem.

If there are no absolute criteria that I can use to define what makes a good poem, and the assignment is to define what I believe is a good poem and evaluate a given writer’s work based on my definition, then maybe the best way to define my preferences is to consider a wider sample set; I might be subjective and biased, but if I consider not just one poem, but many, then maybe it will become clear (to me and to the reader of my essay) what my average criteria are. Considering the page limit, however, it seems I might have to make do with reading the poem with as many different mindsets as possible; eventually, I should have enough sets of “good” and “bad” elements to allow me to consider only the overlap, which should be those qualitative factors not impacted by the specific circumstance of my reading.

Effectively, when I have been asked to assess what is good and bad about a poem, I am forced to evaluate my own values and biases to ensure I do not superimpose these biases into the assessment itself.