system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Do authors/poets actually think of the "metaphorical meaning" when writing, or are teachers just over-analytical?

It seems as if every piece of writing can be given some "metaphorical meaning", but I've always wondered whether the writers have actually thought about it to that extent.
gpt
Yes. 

Sometimes writers want in advance for there to be metaphorical meaning. (Dr. Seuss explicitly intended the butter battle book to be a metaphor for the cold war). Sometimes writers realize it as they're writing and lean into a metaphor (Maybe originally an item in the story was just there for plot reasons, but half way through the author realizes the item can be symbolic).

And sometimes the "metaphorical meaning" comes only from the reader's mind.  But that's alright and it's not (necessarily) over analytical.  The beauty of a work is that it exists separately for each reader, and sometimes it can really add to a work when you see whether it may contain themes and metaphors that even the author didn't realize.   
  
And, though it may seem that way in English class, the point of all this analysis isn't to figure out what a work "really means," it's too give you the tools to figure out on your own what a work means to you. 

It's like when whoever was originally modding Warcraft III realized that the came contained Defense of the Ancients.  The developers at Blizzard didn't realize it, but they'd created something that contained multitudes.