“One of the reasons I enjoy poetry… is how a good poem pretty much insists that the reader learn to savor the swoon of ambiguity. The productive ambiguity of good poems obliges the reader actually to participate with the text, that she collaborate as a co-maker of meaning.
That is to say, a great poem—even a pretty good one—isn’t ever done saying what it has to say, so long as successive generations of alert and energetic readers continue to pick it up.
Ambiguity in any substantial literary text, then, indicates that the significance of the telling doesn’t end with a single reading, and delivers a compelling nudge to the reader that she assist in the telling and the re-telling, the continuing labor of meaning-making.”
— Scott Cairns, Ambiguity Is a Good Thing, Saint Katherine College
