The purpose of meaning

 The interplay between a text and an interpreter creates a chemistry all its own. A chemistry that can be profound for one person can fall flat for another. Something that's beautiful to one person will be ugly to another. Something that can feel empowering to one person can be traumatizing to another. The interplay and politics of this experience is so vast and unpredictable, that the only way it can go wrong is every single time it happens.

Ultimately, the human experience is humiliating, terrifying, traumatizing, exhilarating, satisfying, inspiring, and every other label you could think of. 

Poets will relate to their own work their own way. For me, my poetics is a tool. Sort of a map, maybe. Not everyone benefits from inherited societal values. A poetics of rebellion provides a roadmap against inherited systems of meaning. There will be some people who always need this. I needed this when writers like Blake entered my life. 

The escape from your reason 

My willingness to accept your meaning as valuable has to be related to its capacity to help, limit, grow, or destroy me. If it limits me, then I must transcend it. If destroys me, then I must escape it and fight it. If it isn't helping me grow or (at the very least) not preventing me from achieving growth, then it should be opposed and replaced. Ultimately, setting your own standards is psychologically healthy, philosophically useful, but negatively reinforced and even punished in most systems.

The escape from your meaning

I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's. That was Blake's justification. I don't think I needed one. Whatever brought me here was north of any specific intention I may have had. It was closer to compulsion. Escaping from your meaning, however, leaves me with a problem. I can either end up in a void where there is no meaning, or suffer the strain of creating it for myself. Alternatively, I can align myself with those who ventured the effort, or salad bar their efforts as part of an allegedly-cohesive whole. 

Once you're here, it has to meet your needs.

Escaping meaning itself

Even those who live lives of debauchery believe that their lives are more meaningful because of the debauchery they enjoy. No one escapes meaning until they're brain dead or in a pine box. That is different than saying their ability to make meaning is functioning properly. This, I suspect, is when suicide occurs. While animals in the wild may stop eating and otherwise allow themselves to die, they do not tie ropes around their necks, cut their own throats, or commit any active violence against themselves as far as I know. This is what happens when our ability to make our lives meaningful is destroyed. 

What does it all mean?

By the time you're asking that question, no one can answer it for you. That is to say, if you don't know, no one can tell you an answer that's guaranteed to satisfy you. But along your way, you'll find those who needed to embark on the same journey and they'll leave records behind. And you can see how they approached the matter and take what's important for you and leave the rest, like a great salad bar of poetical rebellion.

Ultimately, meaning has to stay because it's awful hard to motivate yourself without a reason.