Reader Response Literary Theory
“Chaucer doesn’t intend that his Pilgrims’ judgments be on the mark; quite the contrary, in most cases. They constantly overpraise and underpraise one another, miss the point, get the moral wrong, pursue unrelated quarrels, introduce arrant irrelevancies.” ~ Paul Strohm, The Poet’s Tale: Chaucer and the Year that Made the Canterbury Tales, p. 237
Take any poem worth its Delphic salt,
Present the lines and form to students in
A room…and sanity comes to a halt.
Their wayward minds stick in any sin
In thinking they can possibly deploy.
They’ll praise a weakness in it just because
It flirts among their frailties. Then they toy
With it as bloodied mouse in Puss’s paws
No matter what the sonnet’s words imply.
A petty hatred in between this one
And that one will result in something sly
Injected in the argument. Wot fun!
..They treat the artwork as a playful dare
…..But luckily the poem is still there.