Don't Read Poetry: A Book about How to Read Poems

by Stephanie Burt

Overview

An award-winning poet offers a brilliant introduction to the joys—and challenges—of the genre



In Don't Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another—and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about "poetry," whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish—and distinguish among—individual poems.


A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingénues and cognoscenti alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465094509
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	05/21/2019
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	724,119
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Stephanie Burt is a professor of English at Harvard University, coeditor of poetry at the Nation, and the recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim fellowship for poetry. Her work appears regularly in the New York Times Book Review, New Yorker, London Review of Books, and other journals. She lives in Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Introduction Reading Poems 1

1 Feelings 21

2 Characters 61

3 Forms 101

4 Difficulty 153

5 Wisdom 193

6 Community 231

Acknowledgments 277

Permissions 279

Index 285

Editorial Reviews

04/08/2019

In this eloquent literary primer, Burt, a poet and Harvard English professor, contends with poetry’s reputation for inaccessibility. Beginning by proposing readers think in terms of individual works rather than poetry in general, Burt goes on to discuss a wide selection of practitioners, from past masters including W.B. Yeats and Langston Hughes to such contemporary figures as Cathy Park Hong and Terrance Hayes, to support her argument that all readers can find poetic voices and styles agreeable to them. Her selections also show an awareness of the historic underrepresentation of different groups, in terms of races, sexual preference, and languages, in American poetry. The writing falters at times, as when an attempt to seem current with a reference to Pokémon comes across as patronizing. Burt’s writing is best when deeply enmeshed in a poem, such as John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” used to critique modern preconceptions about plainspokeness being the most sincere way of speaking; she describes the 17th-century work’s “elaborate, challenging metaphors not as barriers to sincerity but as ways to achieve it.” Burt’s sweeping, insightful survey makes a great case that with wider exposure, people will discover how poems can be relevant to anyone who has “ever felt unique, or confused, or confusing to others.” (May)

Publishers Weekly

"[An] inviting guide to an art form often seen as abstruse... At once erudite and colloquial, the book resists prescriptive judgments, teems with surprising juxtapositions, and evokes the contagious enthusiasm of a cool teacher."—New Yorker

"[T]here are some empowering concepts and more than a few compelling arguments should you decide to approach Don't Read Poetry . . . with an open mind, a gracious ear, and a loving heart."—New York Journal of Books


"Charming...Burt is a delightful companion who reminds us that poems go down a lot better if we read them out loud and slowly...The whole idea of Don't Read Poetry is not only to celebrate the freedom and inventiveness in poems...but also to connect poems to a larger world of beauty."—The Christian Science Monitor


"Burt is well-suited to convince even the most skeptical readers that poems, indeed, should be read by everybody."—Booklist (starred review)


"In this eloquent literary primer, Burt...contends with poetry's reputation for inaccessibility...[A] sweeping, insightful survey."—Publisher's Weekly

"Don't Read Poetry is for readers hunting sharp, nimble thinking about culture, comprehension, and poems. Whether discussing an ancestral Hawaiian language, a canonical poet like Langston Hughes, or contemporary poets like Rodrigo Toscano and Jennifer Chang, Stephanie Burt manages to illuminate 'the difficult process of turning paired marks into words.' Don't read poetry, she suggests, read poems. This is a book for anyone who reads with curiosity, care and imagination."—Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

"When I began Stephanie Burt's Don't Read Poetry, I fully expected her to widen and deepen my appreciation of this art form. Burt is, after all, a masterful poet, teacher, and literary critic. What I didn't necessarily expect was that I'd have such a great time absorbing what she has to say. Whether you love poetry or resist it, you will enjoy this entertaining and enlightening book."—Wally Lamb


"For the past fifty years, poetry critics have battled over what poetry is, which poets mattered, and which didn't. Stephanie Burt says they had it wrong. Don't read poetry, this dedicated pluralist tells us, if by poetry you mean one thing. If however you want to read poems, and discover the manifold ways they can be — and help readers to be — good (for Burt's aesthetic vision is ultimately ethical), read this lucid, informed, and deeply humane book."—Langdon Hammer, author of James Merrill: Life and Art

From the Publisher

★ 06/01/2019

If good criticism opens windows and lets light in, and great criticism sheds a light of its own, Burt (English, Harvard Univ.; poetry coeditor, the Nation) is a solar-powered 1,000-watt bulb. The provocative title refers to the author's theory that we don't read "poetry" but rather specific and individual poems, her goal being to show readers how to do this more effectively. With insight and expertise, Burt illuminates the shadowy corners of this mysterious art, demonstrating time and again that there is nothing to fear! Six bountiful chapters introduce an array of poets (many contemporary) and offer tips on ways to approach poetry and why we should: poetry helps to make us better humans and broadens our awareness of a vast diversity of thought, bearing the timeless (and sometimes ineffable) wisdom of the world's greatest minds: Homer, Sappho, Shakespeare, Blake, Dickinson, Whitman, Moore, Williams, Ammons, Oliver, and Youn (among them). Periodically, this reader wished Burt would have taken a breath and let us appreciate what she's helped us see. And yet, her generosity, clarity, and open-hearted good sense triumph and may even draw in new readers to appreciate the skills of the literary critic. VERDICT A wonderful guide to a misunderstood art. Essential for all libraries.—Herman Sutter, St. Agnes Acad., Houston

Library Journal