“But what is this poem about?” This dread question stalks almost every poetry classroom, and it’s vanquished only to return with a tenacity that would intimidate Michael Myers. Most recently, Ernie Lepore, a professor at Rutgers, took a swing at it in The New York Times’s philosophy blog, The Stone. Lepore is interested in what’s sometimes called “the heresy of paraphrase” — the idea that what a poem is really about is best represented by the poem itself. He concludes that while the usual reasoning behind the heresy claim is suspect, the idea itself is basically right.