When assigning value to a piece of literature, what qualifies literature as good literature would be its ability to please the reader on a personal level. What further makes literature considered great is how this piece of literature can lead a reader to find hidden meanings in the text to enrich their experience. Looking at Emily Berry's poem, Nothing Mets My Heart Aflame, through reader response criticism, Berry's poem can be measured as great literature when the reader actively creates meaning in what can be considered a satirical poem addressing consumerism or as an anonymous shopping confession. .Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Upon first reading the poem, Berry describes a variety of seemingly insignificant objects ranging from Crittall windows to a brown leather satchel in a sort of rambling, almost easily distracted fashion with its lack of punctuation aside from numerous commas . What makes the objects in the poem significant is how Berry approaches the elements she mentions. After mentioning the objects, the speaker seems distracted and almost senseless, as she seems to describe a feeling of apathy toward her objects, viewing them as museum artifacts and herself as the curator. One particular section that stands out is: “When the class war broke out, one side was busy buying reclaimed flooring / I don’t know what the other side was doing.” Looking at this specific line through reader response reviews, there is a strong correlation with social media trends that emphasize trivial events and so-called popular new styles, to such an extent that users social media ignores more serious events in the real world. Applying a real-word example to the lines of Berry's poem raises hypothetical questions about whether or not the responses to the poem are meaningful and valid for the piece in question. (Ray 425) Therefore, readers' response critiques do not dissect the given text, but rather to know "how to produce that which can therefore be said to be there." (Fish 4) Stanley Fish, author of How to Know a Poem When You See One, argues that “performers do not decode poems; they make them. In reader response criticism, the reader's response to the text is progressive. A key element of reader response criticism is collaboration among other readers. Other collaborative responses to the same text can enrich the first reader's response, thereby bringing the reader closer to the piece of text in question according to Lynn's Texts and Contents: Writing About Literature with Critical Theory. Gathering other responses and discovering how others related to Berry's poem brought similarities as well as differences in how others perceived Nothing Sets My Heart on Fire. When other girls began relating Berry's poem to their own personal experiences, the poem began to read like the rambling confession of a shopaholic. What further supports the confession is the way the speaker is "fascinated by the clothes women wear in magazines/that I read at my physiotherapist's" while believing in "the power of acquisition to purify the 'soul' and how owning a brown leather satchel would make him become 'more politically educated'. (Berry) This tells how many women in my critical methods class,including myself, feel like buying an item of clothing will take them out of their bad mood, but more often than not experience "buyer's remorse", which leads them to not wear the item of clothing. or clothes purchased. What made the poem satirical upon its second reading was the speaker's attitude that we are "running out of eras", particularly given some of the objects mentioned: a mid-century lampshade century, parquet floors, a fixed gear bicycle, Crittall windows, a leather satchel, a collection of church postcards and an antique brooch. (Berry) Although the items are seemingly insignificant and typical, there is a real-world application to the item. Many fashions from previous decades have recently made a comeback in the contemporary world under the label “vintage”. What supports this statement is the sentence “Ancient times are very contemporary at the moment”, especially when “we have almost run out of eras”. (Berry) According to section sixteen of Fish, How to Recognize a Poem, “any object or event that becomes available in an institutional setting…can be characterized. » Thus, the objects mentioned by Berry contain a deeper meaning than the objects one would normally see in an antique store. The elements have the feeling of representing objects, which serve to distract the reader from their original train of thought and how these elements represent a "relatively universal" crisis of the original train of thought "burning" because of a new element. Turning to the point at hand, section eight recalls how poems “teach [readers] ways of looking that will produce what they expect to see.” Berry objects can be represented. However, they also serve to be easily forgotten, and yet the speaker of Berry's poem does not forget them. At the end of the poem, her original thought is interrupted as she "sees herself in a Perspex brooch" while asking for a moment to see postcards of modernist churches due to her position that anything bearing the he vintage label has “become”. like a pellet; » something that has become banal and soothing. Looking deeper into the satirical tone of Berry's poem, the speaker's voice also appears sullen. As Nothing Mets My Heart Aflame continues, the speaker's voice begins to indicate a level of introspection. After explaining that the world is "almost out of time," the speaker states that she does not know what to do, suggesting that she should "make her own clothes and wear a necklace of cotton bobbins." Which further confirms the speaker who doesn't know what to do, she asks if she should go to Berlin. (Berry) While debating whether or not to start a new trend, the speaker begins to think about ways to move the fashion world forward. However, the phrase could also be interpreted as the speaker mocking the fashion industry and citing how everything he does will become popular as older styles are recycled and become mainstream without any extra effort. According to Lynn's Texts and Contexts, the beauty of reader-response criticism is how we can reuse text we think we already know; Yet any type of interpretation of the text varies depending on the views of other readers. One student during my class read the poem as a confession of being a shopaholic while another viewed the poem as mocking, while also intelligently addressing consumerism and materialism in contemporary society. Both views, according to section eight of Fish's How to Recognize a Poem, are equally valid because of.