When engaging with poetry, readers will often ask what a particular poem means. The implicit assumption, of course, is that it is possible to reword or paraphrase a poem in a manner which somehow preserves its essence. In this article, philosophy professor Stefan Valdemar Snævarr argues that no such paraphrase is possible. Intrinsic to poetry, Snævarr argues, is a reliance on metaphor, ambiguity, and ineffability which ensures that the only way to grasp the essence of a poem is to read the poem itself.

The New Critics were a school in literary studies that emphasized close reading of literary works, especially poems, and tended to regard such works as autonomous. Poems could be understood as objects, largely independent of the intentions of the poet and the responses of the readers.

The non-paraphrasability of poetry was a central tenet of this school: Summarizing or otherwise retelling poems was considered futile. One of the school’s members Cleanth Brooks coined the phrase “the heresy of paraphrase.” Call it “The Heresy Thesis.”

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An undergraduate once asked the darling of the New Critics, Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot, what he meant by the line “lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree.” He purportedly replied, “I meant ‘lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree.’”

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