Compulsive Reader Talks

Kristina Darling interviews Nick Courtright about his new book The Proofs, the Figures: Walt Whitman and the Meaning of Poems. In “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman wryly remarks about one’s being “proud to get at the meaning of poems,” a comment highlighting the long-fraught problem of poetic interpretation and the pride-worthy intellectual labor required to elucidate the meaning of a text. Using Whitman’s own “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” an eight-line poem published in 1865, as its case study, The Proofs, the Figures: Walt Whitman and the Meaning of Poems  investigates the chief methods available to readers when they embark on literary meaning-making, while also highlighting the challenges innate to such a task. With examples ranging from the critical and scholarly to the popular-cultural and survey-based, investigating interpretive prospects for “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” confirms that “to get at the meaning of poems” is a project of infinite opportunity both rewarded by and afflicted