Analyzing the Declaration of Independence

"This essay seeks to illuminate that artistry by probing the discourse microscopically--at the level of the sentence, phrase, word, and syllable." -Stephen E. Lucas in The Stylistic Artistry of the Declaration of Independence


What Lucas does to the Declaration of Independence in his essay is quite similar to how we learned in AmCon to analyze poems. He looks for allusions, figuratie language, overtones, nuances, and how each part of the text affects one another. This makes me wonder if absolutely everything that is written can be analyzed in such a way. I realize that the Declaration of Independence was written with the intent of being a beautifully crafted document, but I wonder if everything has such hidden meaning. Do all poems, for example, hide their meaning so well that one must analyze them? Or do some authors simple need to find a rhyming word, not intending for their piece to be dissected and examined. In which case, every hidden meaning one finds in the process would be a creation of theirs, a stretch of their mind to make something fit.  It's interesting how people do that.  But maybe not.  Maybe the author intended for the readers to struggle and pick the poem appart word by word, being purposefully vague to make their point more worthwhile in the finding.  I don't like those people.