Typically when someone sees something for the first time with no pre-existing knowledge, they take it for what it is. For example, a person who sees a dog for the first time in their life, either as a child or an adult, might think, "So that is a dog? What a cute animal." However, someone with a biased view, a veterinarian for example, would look at a dog differently than just the average person because they are trained to find health problems and prescribe medicine to heal them. The important thing to note is that the vet looked at the dog through his/her own medical filter based off of their training whereas the average person just looks at the animal for what it is. This leads into Stanley Fish's essay "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One" because he compares the differences between two of his classes that have been trained in different ways. Fish's main argument in his essay is that people only know an object or subject's significance due to society shaping their minds as they grow up and learn from experience; he goes further to argue that literally everything was assigned a meaning at some point by society and only has meaning because society says it does. Now, Fish knew at the time that he wrote the essay that a lot of people who read it are probably going to disagree, so he had to be very specific and calculated in the way that he made his point in the paper or else his audience would stop reading. Through the use of a personal anecdote in "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One," Fish successfully draws comparisons between the classes, extracts precise language from that, and highlights the social constructs that humans have put in place to form a functioning society.

On pages nine and ten, Fish goes into great detail about his students' analysis of the "poem" which is important because he shows the reader just how large of an effect a certain type of training can have on someone's point of view. In terms of close reading this work, having a personal anecdote is a major tool that authors can utilize to convey meaning to their audience, and it is important to recognize when close reading a work. On page ten, Fish says, "Some of you will have noticed that I have not yet said anything about Hayes...because of all the words in the poem it proved the most recalcitrant to interpretation." Fish's point in this quote is key to the overall work because it reinforces his point that everything is assigned meaning. The name "Hayes" may have been difficult to interpret, and he acknowledges that to the audience, but Fish only states that it is "recalcitrant" to interpretation, not that it is impossible. In other words, his religious poetry class is still going to find a way to give that name meaning. The previous quote foreshadows what the main point of his paper is (that society assigns meaning), and that is when Stanley Fish moves to building his argument.

In order to see how the two classes' views of the words on the blackboard differ, it is important to see that they are two different kinds of classes, with the only common ground being that they are both English classes. Fish's first class studied the style and language of a work to examine what it meant for the work while his next class only studied 17th century religious poetry of England (Fish 8). While both classes are part of the English department, the content is vastly different between each class, therefore explaining why the second class analyzed the names on the blackboard completely different than the first. To the first class, the names were just an assignment of some authors they had to read, so they interpreted it as an assignment. However, to the second class, as soon as the professor falsely told them the names formed a religious poem, the students immediately used the filter they had developed from that particular class to connect the names to the Bible and break down the whole poem from a religiously significant point of view. Even though those names were not actually part of a religious poem, Fish wanted to see what would happen if he told his second class that they were, and what he suspected would come true, did.

The whole point that Fish argues in this paper is that people will interpret things based on their own experiences and training, and that there is no completely unbiased point of view, even if it is not a positive or negative bias. Another important sentence to his argument is as follows: "It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities" (Fish 11). While it may take multiple attempts to read and fully comprehend the previous statement, it is like a Eureka moment when the audience understands what Fish means by it. Essentially, he puts his argument into a clear, concise sentence. It is the fact that based on experience and training, people can assign things endless meanings even if there is not one. Continuing on page 11, Fish even goes further to call the filter a "recipe" because his class followed a set process. From the close reading lens, using an analogy is a good technique to help the audience understand the main point more easily, but Stanley Fish likes also makes use of short, yet precise, sentences to help ingrain his point into the audience. For example, on page 12, Fish says, "interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing" (Fish 12), arguing that objects' meanings are not "discovered," but rather made.

The "construction" of meanings is central to Stanley Fish's argument throughout the paper, and towards the end of his essay, he highlights the fact that even humans' most basic knowledge comes from somewhere in society (14). On page 17, Fish states that, "once one realizes that the conceptions that fill consciousness, including any conception of its own status, are culturally derived, the very notion of an unconstrained self becomes incomprehensible." The two previous points come together to make the audience acutely aware of how little control they have over their already-present ideas and meanings about things, so that is a calculated move to "corner" the audience in a way that avoids angering the reader while still making it extremely difficult for him or her to have a strong rebuttal.

By drawing comparisons and using a personal anecdote with analogies, Fish is able to form concise, meaningful sentences, to highlight to the audience the fact that nothing has inherent meaning but instead is derived from social constructs. While Fish's essay dismantles peoples' notions of human knowledge, he still reminds the audience that is important to find significance in things, or people will lead miserable lives. While there may be flaws in his logic, Fish makes valid points that people only know what things are and what they mean based on past institutional knowledge and that nothing has inherent meaning. Fish even goes so far as to say that "all objects are made and not found, and that they are made by the interpretive strategies that we set in motion...the means by which they are made are social and conventional" (Fish 14). Ultimately, Fish does a very good job at conveying his viewpoint to the audience even if the audience does not agree with him. He presents the information in a way that the average person can relate to rather than using overblown and sophisticated language the average reader will blindly read without comprehending. Writing a paper on this subject, it is hard to write it in a way that makes the reader actually want to listen, but Fish utilizes all of the necessary literary tools to do so effectively.

