John Fuller's book is one of those very welcome treatises on reading poetry, discussing some of the problems encountered by readers, strategies used by poets and offering some possible solutions. In it, he takes a number of poems, both well-known and not quite so well-known, and finds out what they are about.
His approach is to regard poems as puzzles for the reader which certainly much twentieth century work can be and some before that, too. The reader's enjoyment is, he says, in the solving of those puzzles. Except, for me, I don't think it is and if I want a word puzzle, I go to The Times on Saturday or The Observer on Sunday. I don't mind not understanding a poem completely and wonder if I did if I would sometimes like it as well as I do when I enjoy the words, their music and also some of the mystery. And by no means all poetry is difficult enough to qualify for Fuller's level of interpretation.
Of course, if a poem is too difficult then one either needs a guide or you can leave it to stew in its own wilful obscurity but I don't spend much of my time struggling with interpretation. And neither would Fuller's book help because it doesn't offer a system of how to unlock the puzzles but provides answers from his enormous range of reading and knowledge, what with him being Emeritus Fellow at Oxford University, which is not a resource we all have.
So, once a book has set off in a direction that I don't want to go, it is doubly hard for it to recover. As Fuller shows us how he has decoded various difficulties in Modernist and Romantic poery, I am only half interested and half impressed. But, taking various themes on literary allusion, reference points, problems with titles, speakers, readers and text, there are numerous worthy passages to appreciate. Most striking is his analysis of Jabberwocky, which is a reading that we weren't offered at school, and the answer to the question in the title is 'Napoleon' in Shelley's canonical sonnet.
It is comforting that many of one's doubts, as both writer and reader of poems, are commonplace to one so highly qualified and Fuller is a sympathetic if fearsomely high-minded in his commentary. But although of use in places and immaculate in its scholarship throughout, if one doesn't like the premise then the argument is unlikely to bring you round. The book doesn't convince me that this is a way that I, at least, can enjoy literature.
