How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse
Author: Thomas C. Foster
Publisher: Harper Perennial
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Cover Description
From the bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor comes this essential primer to reading poetry like a professor that unlocks the keys to enjoying works from Lord Byron to the Beatles.
No literary form is as admired and feared as poetry. Admired for its lengthy pedigree — a line of poets extending back to a time before recorded history — and a ubiquitous presence in virtually all cultures, poetry is also revered for its great beauty and the powerful emotions it evokes. But the form has also instilled trepidation in its many admirers mainly because of a lack of familiarity and knowledge.
Poetry demands more from readers — intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually — than other literary forms. Most of us started out loving poetry because it filled our beloved children's books from Dr. Seuss to Robert Louis Stevenson. Eventually, our reading shifted to prose and later when we encountered poetry again, we had no recent experience to make it feel familiar. But reading poetry doesn’t need to be so overwhelming. In an entertaining and engaging voice, Thomas C. Foster shows readers how to overcome their fear of poetry and learn to enjoy it once more.
From classic poets such as Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to later poets such as E.E. Cummings, Billy Collins, and Seamus Heaney, How to Read Poetry Like a Professor examines a wide array of poems and teaches readers:
How to read a poem to understand its primary meaning.
The different technical elements of poetry such as meter, diction, rhyme, line structures, length, order, regularity, and how to learn to see these elements as allies rather than adversaries.
How to listen for a poem’s secondary meaning by paying attention to the echoes that the language of poetry summons up.
How to hear the music in poems — and the poetry in songs!
With How to Read Poetry Like a Professor, readers can rediscover poetry and reap its many rewards.
TL;DR Review
How to Read Poetry Like a Professor is fun, helpful, and the perfect book to help you start to read poetry more deeply.
For you if: Want to read more poetry but feel like you don’t know how it works.
Full Review
I read a lot, but I didn’t study English or literature in college. I always felt like I was missing the tools to read deeply, to pick up on nuances and meaning. So a few years ago, I read Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor, and I loved it. It was exactly what I was looking for. So this time around, when I wanted to read more poetry but I wasn’t sure how to even approach a poem at anything deeper than surface level, I turned to him again. How to Read Poetry Like a Professor was, once again, exactly what I was looking for.
In his signature witty, wisecracking, approachable voice, Foster introduces us to the different elements that make poetry poetry. Things like line breaks, and the sounds in the words, and rhythm. All things I knew were important, but I’d never learned to interpret. This was a great introduction that was both fun and helpful!
I do wish that he’d pulled in more examples that came from modern poets rather than classics (lots of old white dudes in there), but ultimately this book ended up being the perfect starter on my poetry journey. Now I find myself actively wanting to read more poetry. (As a first step, I subscribed to a few poem-of-the-day newsletters and followed some Instagram accounts.) Next, to keep learning, I think I’m going to read Don’t Read Poetry by Stephanie Burt!