Creative art--literature, especially--can be described with two broad categories: propaganda and transformation. With propaganda [art with a lower case "a"] the artist usually desires to make a point or leave the reader with a moral, a lesson. What does poem #3, Habitus, in Simple Gifts, mean, to use an obvious example? Though I was trying to define briefly the way habits work against us or for us, essentially the poem means we ought to be aware of how habits work and then choose our habits with care. A lesson, perhaps, written because it was delightful to write and to discover the images of ruts and potholes, etc., but a lesson none the less. I could have written an essay or, better, directed you to Dorothy Sayers' marvellous introduction to volume 2 of her translation of Dante's Comedy, The Purgatorio. I suppose I wrote the poem instead because I really wanted to make something myself dealing with the destructive nature of sinful habits. Anger unchecked leads to more anger; anger is one of the seven deadly sins for a good reason. Dante's repentant sinners move in a blinding cloud of smoke. Writing can also be discovery in this category, and this writer was/is mostly optimistic.
Most propaganda is easy to recognize--bad religious art comes to mind. You will go to church; you will love your neighbor; you will love God! etc. The line between good propaganda and weak transformational art [art with an upper case "A"--Art] can be difficult to find or define.
A good image for what I mean by transformational art is perhaps that of the potter. The potter begins with a lump of clay, and according to the Idea in his or her mind, transforms the clay into a cup or vase or pitcher. [Here too I suspect one might make a distinction between art and Art. We would have to ask a serious potter.]
In literature the problem of meaning regarding the transformational work is frequently frustrating, yet it's the question we are always compelled to make: "What does this work mean?" That, however, I think is the wrong question. Better to start by asking what the work is doing. Transformation after all is a process that involves a beginning, a middle, and an end. Understanding involves "seeing into" the work; the work cannot be reduced to a moral or a lesson without violating the work, so to speak--treating the work the way the Puritans treated Hester Prynne. They stripped her of her humanity and made her into a moral sermon on the sin of adultery. They humiliated her and violated her humanity. The beauty of reading Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter is to watch the way in which the Scarlet Letter works throughout the story to restore Hester to the human community and restore to that world the mystery of human life and the mystery of the love in which our human lives are grounded. Hawthorne's characters do what they will do [Hester does want to run away with the Minister], but once the story begins, they "do it" within the context of the scarlet letter, and that makes all the difference in the world. Consider the line, "The scarlet letter had not yet done its office." The scarlet letter is the real hero of the novel, which I think is clear from within the story.
When I was an undergraduate and took a seminar on Hawthorne, Melville, and Emerson, a great course, I thought I had it made on Hawthorne because I was given or found a list of Hawthorne's major ideas. I wrote them in my Modern Library edition of Hawthorne's complete works. Hidden sin, for example, is destructive to the human self. Well yes! Look at Dimmesdale. I thought I knew everything about Hawthorne. I was very young. While it may be very comforting to have such a thing, we do not really know anything about Hawthorne's Art except that this idea may be part of his raw material.
The best art is transformational. When art is understood to be primarily propaganda [teach a lesson or point a moral], we get the 18th century whose artists were on a mission, alas!--from which later artists like Keats and others rescued us. Alexander Pope is rather wonderful in that century. He could point a moral with the best of them, but he was also a real artist as the Rape of the Lock should make clear.
It is also interesting that the real art in the 18th century comes primarily in the genre of satire, whereas in the 16th and 17th century it seems to be tragedy (Shakespeare's King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, etc.); these genres are the ones in each of the ages that move us most deeply regarding their exploration of the human condition.
In thinking about meaning, finally today, the most important element is to try to see the work from the inside. It is easy to look "at" the thing, and important, but "looking at" must be accompanied by trying to look from within. One sees differently. The distinction feels like the distinction between Buber's "I-It" and his "I-Thou." But for today, enough.