Just recall how unbearable poems become when they are recited by actors, who, wanting to "interpret," ignore the meter of the verse, make dramatic enjambements as if they were declaiming prose, concern themselves with the content and not with the rhythm. To read a classical poem, you have to assume the singing rhythm the poet wanted. It is better to recite Dante as if he had written children's jingles than pursue only his meanings to the exclusion of everything else.
[Umberto Eco, "Postscript," The Name of the Rose, Harcourt Brace (New York: 1984), p. 520.]
And yet I am not so sure. There is no question that failure to be guided by the rhythm and music of the words is a failure to read poetry properly. But I find children's-jingles reading even more grating. The poem of "In Flanders Fields" by John MacRae is a good one; it's a popular poem in Canada, and so is often mutilated by children's recitations. And they recite it exactly as if it were a children's jingles, so it sounds like this:
In Flanders fields
the poppies blow
Between the crosses,
row on row,
That mark our place;
and in the sky
The larks, still brave-
ly singing, fly
Scarce heard amid
the guns below.
When it should sound more like this:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses,
row on row,
That mark our place;
and in the sky
The larks,
still bravely singing,
fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
It's utterly maddening. I think that the two exaggerated readings (all meaning vs. all jingle) are equal and opposite sins -- vices of defect and excess. But aesthetic sins aren't like moral sins. Nothing rights a moral sin of excess or defect except moderation. You can't cancel out a sin of excess with a sin of defect, because that just leaves you doubly guilty. But with aesthetic sins two wrongs may make a right. It's actually a good exercise to read poems in both ways, I think, because it's like practicing scales.
