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Makale Özeti:
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When reading literary texts, we have to be aware of the fact that each reader of a certain text will
get a different meaning out of it. It is a nonsense to ask of readers to get the exact same meaning
because we cannot possibly know what the author had in mind when he wrote the text and we make
sense of everything, especially poetry, through our own personal life experience. Meaning ”occurs
within and by means of complex systems of codes derived from and determined by human culture”.
In order to understand a text, which is open, incomplete, insufficient, we have to make use of our
imagination and background knowledge to decipher the codes. The reader’s task is ”to draw out of
the work the full complexity of meanings pre-packaged within it”. Thus the emphasis of poetics
shifts from the ”work of art” to the ”work of interpretation” which creates the poem from the
poem’s primary material. The reader’s imagination has to fill in the gaps in the text the author left
for us, gaps which wait to be filled with meaning and which make us, the readers, become active
and creative agents of deciphering codes. Once put on paper, ”the work of art never comes to rest”.
With every reading, a new meaning will be found. With every reader, a range of new meanings will
be found. But even more so, with every new reading by the same reader, especially over years, new
meanings will be found. How does this happen? you might ask. Through life experience and
background knowledge.
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