Lyric and self vs. subject

This week's reading was quite insightful.  Culler presented how poetry and lyric achieve its effect as literature and how it evokes emotion and meaning.  Poetry is elegant and it usually achieves the effect of a whole novel in a few lines, usually.  When reading poetry, I find the first few times to be extremely difficult because of the uniqueness in language and the many devices it uses. Poetry has a certain brevity and diction about it.  Novels and short stories have to build more of the setting and the mood, while poetry does it in  one or two words.  I think it focuses on the details that matter rather than elaborating, and the overly dramatic language it uses it times makes up for not elaborating.  It's a trade off between the length of the piece and the weight of one image.  Poetry can do amazing things if we can understand to read them right. I've known many poems that made me stop and rethink things.  Literature isn't very clear any ways.  It's definition is ambiguous.  I think what make poetry is also ambiguous because there are new genres like prose poetry that incorporate elements of both poetry and narrative.  Sometimes, it's really hard to tell which genre it belongs to.  Personification and apostrophe isn't exclusive to poetry nor are any of the other devices.  There's this fluidity to all the genres so I guess we could interpret many things as poetry.  I think what sets poetry apart, though is that it can very closely imitate human emotion: the paradoxes and the periodic rhythm and even the unclear expression or statement.
It's difficult to read poetry objectively since most poetry comes from experience.  Someone who forgot everything they ever knew couldn't possibly read poetry. Memory serves as that background for subjectivity, for opinions.   Reading and dissecting the words will only get the reader so far, so that's where the subjective comes into play.

Reading, any form of reading involves subjectivity.  The toolbox distinguishes the "self" and the "subject."   It reminds me of the scientific form of "nature vs. nurture, " which argues basically the same thing only on a different plane.  We are a product of our surroundings, but we have somethings that come naturally to us.  As infants, we cry when we need something.  To learn language we mimic others, then we comprehend, and produce.  As we grow older, we continue to internalize our surroundings.  This is experience, and I think it could be possible to be unique in the sense that there are so many combination of experiences that it's difficult to have two the same.  I find it sad when I think that we aren't unique human beings, and I realize that our experiences aren't unique.  Other people experience happiness, poverty, or love.   Because we're all humans, there is a collective experience.  I guess it's not very possible to be that individual or even original. 
Anyways, the "subject" interests me very much.  It involves interpellation, which reminds me of when someone says "hey loser" or "hey stupid" in a crowd of people, and many of them will turn.  For whatever reason, people respond.  Maybe because they've done something stupid in their lives or don't feel like a winner.  I guess in a way, we have to accept things because changing context is near impossible.  We live, experience, and internalize it everyday.  It's impossible to avoid. 
The story about the gatekeeper reminded me of "Allegory to the Cave."  There are three doorkeepers of the law like the three branches of government who keeps the countryman or the citizen from the law.  He can't reach the law because of the doorkeepers, so he's a subject.  In the cave, three prisoners are chained to a wall, like the similar barrier of the gates.  One man ventures into the light and comes back and they kill him.  There's something the three gatekeepers and prisoners want to keep out of reach.  I think what both of these teach us is that the law is unavoidable.  We are somehow always prisoners of thoughts or a higher power, and we are taught to obey or be punished.