The question of context

When we were presented with the poem "We Wear the Mask" in class without any authorial context and were told to freewrite about it, I felt a slight sense of panic. I enjoyed the poem and I thought it expressed an understandable emotion. But one thought lingered even as I wrote about what I thought the poem communicated: Who is the "we"?! It made me feel like I could only make up what it was about, but it wouldn't be valid until I knew the "we" based on the author's identity. When we were informed with the poet was written by Paul Laurence Dunbar, a son of slaves, I couldn't help but view the poem differently. It suddenly seemed exclusivist and non-applicable to me.

Last semester I studied Alfred Lord Tennyson in Victorian class, and I remember stumbling across lines in his poetry that I had heard people quote elsewhere. As I read "In Memoriam A.H.H.," I remembered when my sister told me about one of her many high school break-ups, and she said her new favorite quote was "Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all." And in reading "Ulysses," I recognized a line that a friend of mine had posted on her facebook page: " I am a part of all that I have met." I was studying Tennyson through the lens of the Victorian era, and I wondered if people like my sister and my friend who quoted these lines knew anything about the Victorian faith crisis or Tennyson's striving to create his own meaning in what he saw as an otherwise futile existence. I wondered if my sister knew anything about the heart-wrenching loss Tennyson experienced with the death of his best friend. Does it matter if they didn't? Is it okay to take text out of the context in which it was written and attribute it with our own personal meanings?