on literary analysis

or, how not to take advice, as seen by the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. she wrote the following as part of a brief preface to her famous long work 'Poem Without a Hero':

I have even been advised to make it more clear.
I will refrain from doing this.
The poem does not have any third, seventh, or twenty-ninth meanings.

...i feel as if i can almost hear her distinct St. Petersburg accent, annoyed, saying this. i wonder what she would think, to find her lines as they appear in my copy of her collected work--which has so many notes for every poem, the book is 947 pages long.

carrying this tome around with me, i really wish some of the scholars had taken Akhmatova a little more literally.