When you read Virginia Woolf's, The Waves, you have to resist the urge to try to make sense of what you're reading. I enjoy the feeling of not really understanding what I'm reading, as long as I have some understanding of it. If it's completely opaque, that's no fun. Some of Julia Kristeva's writing is like that for me. I like Kristeva though. She really makes you think.
My favorite literary critic is Harold Bloom. I'm not sure why. What was it that first drew me to him? There's something very compelling about his ideas. Bloom posits that the mark of genius is strangeness and he also exemplifies that in his writing. It's so weird that, he has said of his work, The Anxiety of Influence - which was the first in a series of books about his central theory - that, reading it later in life, there are parts that even he doesn't know what he originally meant. And he's such a perceptive reader - and of course, he's reading his own work - that, if he doesn't get it, no one on earth is going to get it.
It's indeterminate. That's kind of the point, actually. It creates a new meaning that belongs to it. The only thing that can elucidate a poem is another poem.
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