ABSTRACT
‘Qua work of art,’ Eliot wrote in an early paper on ‘Hamlet,’ ‘the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret; we can only criticize it according to standards, in comparison to other works of art; and for interpretation the chief task is the presentation of relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know.’ There is no definitive ‘interpretation’ possible for any poem worthy of the name. A poet should aim, as Eliot says in his essay introductory to ‘A Choice of Kipling’s Verse,’ ‘at making something which shall first of all be, something which in consequence will have the capability of exciting, within a limited range, a considerable variety of responses from different readers’.
