Article: "What's the import?": indefinitiveness of meaning in nineteenth-century parabolic poems.(Critical Essay)

For Poe, the "intrinsic and essential character" of Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" is "a suggestive indefinitiveness of meaning" and thus a "detinitiveness of [...] effect." This description may also be applied to other nineteenth-century parabolic or fabular poems: Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "The Eve of St. Agnes," Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," and Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market." These poems encourage interpretive activity in the reader but allow for a plurality of meanings. An aesthetic approach to these poems takes issue with the reader-response premises of Jack Stillinger's ...

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