I really fucking hate poetic analysis.
Honestly I do. It really pisses me off.
Its just so full of bullshit over-analysis. I mean obviously there are different interpretations to poetry, but is it really necessary to be such a pretentious wanker about it?
I honestly thought doing English Language not Literature at Uni would spare me all this crap. Apparently not.
I think my hatred for poetry started during my GCSEs when in a class discussion about a poem, one of my peers claimed that the use of a full stop symbolised finality. Sorry, what? What a load of shit. They used a full stop because its the correct orthographical convention for ENDING A SENTENCE.
It was that day, at the age of 15, that I realised you could say whatever you wanted when analysing poetry and no one could argue, and whilst that helped me get through my English Literature GCSE, it meant that the seeds of hatred had been planted.
Today those seeds grew a little more.
Unfortunately one of my many mistakes in life was choosing to do an Old English module this semester, and as a result this meant an essay involving literary criticism on Old English poetry. As if literary criticism on modern poetry wasn't bad enough.
So as I researched various interpretations of various Old English poems, I became more and more angered by what I was reading.
Here's a fairly typical extract analysing The Wanderer from a book called English Literature before Chaucer by Michael Swanton: "Picking up and developing several of the images of the first part of the poem, and thus universalizing the experience of the individual Wanderer, the final statement represents not one wallowing in self-pity but the quietude of dignified self-realization, aware of his place in the mutable flux of the world's being. Transcending the grim experience in his individual plight, the Wanderer moves from signs of physical dissolution to a metaphysical understanding concluding with an echo of the doom-laden". That shit goes on for near enough 300 pages.
FUCK OFF MICHAEL SWANTON. SERIOUSLY GO DIE.
The phrases "mutable flux of the world's being" and "physical dissolution to a metaphysical understanding" are particularly angering/pretentious/death-worthy.
As a result I've written Mr. Swanton a Haiku:
Dear Mr. Swanton
Please go and die in a hole
Pretentious wanker