Logic in Poetry? Thank God for Perrine!

Reading Perrine's take on the interpretation of poetry forced me to see the study of language in a new light.  I had previously questioned quite often, as Perrine mentioned in his writing, why poems couldn't take on any number of equally correct meanings.  After all, language arts had always been the subject explained to me as requiring abstract thought and diverse perspectives to fully understand its many solutions.  Accordingly, I, someone obsessed with logic, order, and the linear, analytical thought processes that mathematics encourage, hated language class.  However, Perrine argues that to interpret any poem correctly, one must combine logic with abstract thought in order to remove all of the outlandish, "farfetched" interpretations that people produce and identify the correct one.  Logic in poetry?  Thank God for Perrine!  Knowing that some of the ridiculous interpretations out there can be logically refuted with Perrine's strategies makes me feel exponentially better about language arts.  I can rest assured knowing that the understandings English professors teach actually have some method behind them.  This method, Perrine's strategy, is actually fairly simple.

The gist of Perrine's method is this: explain the details without contradicting any explanation and don't assume any outside variables.  Such a simple strategy provides for an easy understanding of poetry and I love Perrine for presenting it to me.  Also, when I read Perrine's statement, "A poem - in fact, any pattern of words - defines an area of meaning, no more," I felt like I had an epiphany in studying poetry (Perrine 4).  As long as multiple interpretations explain a poem's details without contradiction and reliance on outside assumptions, they can both be correct if the stay within the area of meaning defined by the poem.  Therefore, language becomes like math.  As in mathematics, a language student follows a logical process to form a poetic interpretation.  Given that the student follows that process well and remains within the area defined by the poem, his interpretation must be correct.  However, another's interpretation, produced in the same way, could also hold true.  The only difference between the two subjects, language and math, lies in the number of acceptable answers.  Language has become logical!  Next comes the apocalypse.