Critic: Emily Dickinson's poetry demonstrates that meaning cannot reside entirely within a poem itself, but is alwa...
MeredithAugust 20, 2019
Choice B
I didn't choose B because even though they are from different eras they could have the same culture leading them to have the same beliefs and thus the same interpretation. What is wrong with making that conclusion?
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The argument is saying that interpretation = poem + reader's system of beliefs and any two readers from different cultures OR eras have two different systems of beliefs. "OR" tells us that as long as one of these premises is true, we could conclude that the system of beliefs is different. Since a modern reader and a nineteenth-century reader are from different eras and must have radically different systems of beliefs per the stimulus, we can conclude that their interpretation must differ as well.
