Poet Matthew Zapruder say that we are too often asked to find the ‘hidden meanings’ in poems, as if a poem is a riddle.

Source: Have we been taught poetry all wrong?

Response: Zapruder’s book sounds terribly dishonest from this article. In a short space he veers from romantic canard (“[poetry] can really open a person up…in a way that can’t be done by any other form of writing”) to political cliché (“this intuitive, associative power, he says, can be lost on people because of the way poetry is taught” – it’s always those damn teachers) to absurdities divorced from reality (“[poetry is] something elusive and complex, said in the simplest way possible”). m.j.smith