3 ms·

My 11th grade English teacher tried to explain what every colour in a story meant. "Red is clearly used here to mean ..."

• bane 14y ago
  That happened to me as well, and after a particularly extended dive into Robert Frost over a week, I went off to the library information system (this was pre-internet, so lots of swapping disks) and hunted down some interviews with Frost near the end of his life where he stated with some frustration his dislike of the practice of finding hidden symbols or political statements in his poetry. The Mending Wall, for example, is often used in classrooms as a symbolic reference of the Berlin wall, this was not Frost's intentions at all, but was something imagined up when he happened to have read it during a visit to Moscow during the Cold War. Proof in point, modern takes on the same poem no longer conjure up images of an impending Cold War nuclear doom.