"What's the import?": Indefinitiveness of meaning in nineteeth-century parabolic poems

For Edgar Allen Poe, the "intrinsic and essential character" of Alfred Lord Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" is "a suggestive indefinitiveness of meaning" and thus a "definitiveness of [...] effect." This description may also be applied to other 19th-century parabolic or fabular poems. These poems encourage interpretive activity in the reader but allow for a plurality of meanings. An aesthetic approach to these poems takes issue with the reader-response premises of Jack Stillinger's "Reading 'The Eve of St. Agnes': The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction." A reading of "Childe Roland" emphasizes the poem's dreamlike features and that several leading interpretations are all instantiations of the poem's archetypal plot--a testing encounter with a greatly superior opponent. A consideration of "Goblin Market" subsumes both Christian and new historicist-feminist readings and illustrates the usefulness of an aesthetic approach in making qualitative discriminations and evaluative determinations.