For this reason, a good poem can be read again and again, with more of the meaning discovered each time. The only way to find a meaning or have an emotion is to go down inside the poem and let it have its way. Afterwards one will be able to say that a certain poem is about aspirations, or humility, or disillusionment or even the fun of a catchy rhyme. We will recognize several forms of experience. Poetry, then, does have meaning, but the poetry exists not so much in the meaning as in those intangible elements that sharpen and deepen the meaning, charging it with the force of life itself.
Poetry is breath filling the lungs, blood pulsing in the veins.
These immaterial or invisible substances are seemingly insignificant in themselves, but withdraw them and, though the body seems the same, it dies. Liars ever, men of Crete, Savage brutes that live to eat. By quoting a Cretan poet Paul ingeniously underlines the authority of his own judgment without exposing himself to the charge of being anti-Cretan. Once we have firmly in mind the genuine nature of meaning in poetry, once we realize that all poems have meanings but that not all meanings are poems, we are ready to attempt useful interpretation of poetry. It is, therefore, quite possible, and indeed it frequently happens, that several interpretations, all somewhat different but not mutually exclusive, illuminate different aspects of the poem.