The Existentialist angst of interpreting poetry

‘all they want to do / is tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it. / They begin beating it with a hose / to find out what it really means.’ - Billy Collins

Blame it on postmodernism, relativism, or any other -ism you like, but nowadays there are more poetic interpretations than poets. So how does one figure out what a poem really means — or if there's such a thing as intrinsic meaning at all? Sartre and Camus might have answers, but so does Michele Ledda of the Independent. He examines what happens to poetic criticism when the "flight from meaning" leaves readers without a leg to stand on...

Any schoolchild will tell you that in poetry ‘there are no right or wrong answers.’ Students are often taught that the teacher’s opinion (embodying, ideally, a lifetime of personal study and centuries of literary criticism and canon formation) is no more valid than their first impressions – it’s a matter of personal taste after all, and aesthetic judgment is a fraud.   It takes a brave soul like parent Joseph Reynolds to argue that The Simpsons is not good enough for the English curriculum – thoroughly ignored, incidentally, by parent-power enthusiasts.

...and why sometimes hard and fast meaning is not such a bad thing after all:

Many poets abhor the idea that authorial intention is a privileged locus of meaning.   ‘Whatever meaning you see in my poems, that’s their meaning, even if I hadn’t thought of it,’ Gillian Clarke told my GCSE students. When Wendy Cope, who doesn’t seem so keen on authorial euthanasia, insisted with a group of sixth-formers that her poem Budgie Finds His Voice had nothing to do with environmentalism but was instead about Ted Hughes, they ‘tried to argue that it might, nonetheless, say something about Wendy Cope’s views on pollution and global warming.’  ‘I had to be very firm,’ says Cope, showing the difficulty of asserting authorial intention at a time when ‘the author has no authority.’