After you have constructed your interpretation and analysis, it is important to step back and consider the purpose of the poems. The ideas of authorial intent and audience impact, while possibly never explicitly explained in these terms, are both significant to literature and poetry especially. Authorial intent refers to the author’s, or poet in this case, conscious encoding of meanings in the text. You may recognise this from the sort of questions I was pondering in the annotations chapter on why a poet chose to explore ideas or to express something in a certain way.
