Responding to My Own Post...

In re-reading "The Affective Fallacy" (which I'm not sure I understood any better the second time around), I found these two passages towards the end of the essay:

"Poetry is a way of fixing emotions or making them more permanently perceptible when objects have undergone a functional change from culture to culture, or when as simple facts of history they have lost emotive value with loss of immediacy." (1402)

"In short, though cultures have changed and will change, poems remain and explain; and there is no legitimate reason why criticism, losing sight of its durable and peculiar objects, poems themselves, should become a dependent of social history or of anthropology." (1403)

I suppose the above quotes would be W and B's response to my long winded question of poet X and poem Y and World War Z. If I'm reading the essay correctly, W and B are saying that if poet X is responding to World War Z, then, for the poem to successfully display the author's intention, people of any time period should be able to deduce, simply from reading the poem, that it referred to World War Z.

I reluctantly admit that I agree, in part, with W and B. If the poet meant readers to understand that the poem was about a fear of growing old (for example), but the majority of readers do not arrive at this conclusion, then obviously neither the author nor the poem have done their duty.

But there is another part of me that does not agree with W and B, simply because what I feel (yes, feel) they want a poem to be is too straightforward, too clinical. I don't want to be walloped over the head with a poem's meaning; I want to have to think about it, to explore it a bit.

I know I am oversimplifying, but I have not yet learned to put aside my own feelings and emotional reactions, so my response to W and B will be an emotional response, not an entirely rational one.

And I'm okay with that.