The Obscurity of Poems

I have to admit, that when I first came into this class I guess I was what you call "naive" when it came to poetic interpretation. I had this preconception that, no matter how confounding or obscure a poem may seem to be at first, at the heart of it there was always simplicity and clear meaning. Then we hit the modernists: Moore, Eliot, and Williams. Their poems took obscurity to a whole new level. At least with Williams, a large portion of his poetry was laced with prose so we had a general sense of where he was going, but often with Moore and Eliot we just had vague, scattered fragments of ideas as to what they were talking about. My friend once asked me if we were reading poetry from the likes Dickenson, Frost, Poe, Keats, etc, but I told him that right now we were reading more modernist poetry. He asked me what that was like and I, in a somewhat cynically joking way, replied something along the lines of "modernist poetry is the art of taking the written English language and obsfucating it so as to be completely incomprehensible, and then calling it poetry." Obviously this is an exageration, but there were times when I felt that some lines were so nonsensical as to be almost arbitrarily written that way based on impulse alone.

While I was considering what poem(s) to choose for the last paper, I decided to read some of the introduction to The Waste Land. I found this, Eliot's view on The Waste Land towards the end of his life, rather interesting: "I think that in the early poems it was a question . . . of not being able to -- having more to say than one knew how to say, and having something one wanted to put into words and rhythm which one didn't have the command of words and rhythm to put in a way immediately apprehensible. That type of obscurity comes when a poet is still at the stage of learning how to use language. you have to say the thing the difficult way. The only alternative is not saying it at all, at that stage . . . . In The Waste Land I wasn't even bothering whether I understood what I was saying."

It's a little shocking, although possibly not entirely surprising, that even Eliot himself admits he didn't bother to understand everything he was writing. While this by no means renders The Waste Land just an arbitrary work of nonsense, it does bring up the question of whether or not you can truly understand what the poet is intending to express (assuming that they first understand what they're trying to express!).