No one could disagree that <over> analysis of a literary text is a bad thing, but the romanticizing of an anti-analysis view strikes me as equally bad since it poses as having no "analysis" when in fact it always does. Even appreciating the "beauty" of a rainbow projects a culturally coded attitude about natural phenomena that is different from another cultural attitude that sees not beauty but the power of the Rainbow Goddess. How more so then is necessary the <judicious> use of analysis to understand and thus appreciate deeply something made by a human hand in a particular time and place. Sure--one doesn't wish to destroy the pleasure of the reading of MT: he still makes me laugh. But... I do ask myself why that laugh happens. So the truth is that the frog has to be dissected and that it never can be killed (a sign of the power of the Frog God, eh?). Jim Caron P.S. The analogy of humor as a frog that dies when dissected is not from an MT quote but is from E. B. White's "Some Remarks on Humor."