How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse

by Thomas C. Foster

Overview

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062113788
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/27/2018
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	400,723
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Thomas C. Foster is the author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor, How to Write Like a Writer, How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor, and other works. He is professor emeritus of English at the University of Michigan, Flint, where he taught classes in contemporary fiction, drama, and poetry as well as creative writing and freelance writing. He is also the author of several books on twentieth-century British and Irish literature and poetry.

Table of Contents

What Is Poetry? 1

Introduction: A (Slightly) Alien Life-Form 3

1 The Sounds of Sense 10

2 Sounds Beyond Sense 21

Interlude: What the Heck Is It? 29

How Is Poetry? 35

3 Redeeming the Time 37

4 The Rhythm(s) of the Saints 49

5 The Long (or Short) Gray Line 62

6 Our Word Is Our Bond 72

7 Rhyme Thyme 83

8 Look Who's Talking 92

9 If It's Square, It's a Sonnet 101

10 A Haiku, a Rondeau, and a Villanelle Walk into a Bar 111

11 Shapes of Things to Come 126

Interlude: Is Verse Ever Really Free? 133

12 Images, Symbols, and Their Friends 138

13 Right Out Loud 147

14 Bards and Beatles 157

Why Is Poetry? 169

15 Wanted: A Few Good Martians 171

Conclusion: Supreme Fictions 181

Poems Cited 189

Critical Works for Reference 191

Acknowledgments 195

Index 197

Permissions 211

Editorial Reviews

02/05/2018
Literary critic Foster (How to Read Literature Like a Professor) explicates the fundamentals of reading and understanding poetry in this accessible guide designed for the lay audience. He addresses the common anxieties expressed by readers unfamiliar with poetry (i.e., “I don’t understand it”), and responds with patient and frequently witty explanation. In addition to breaking down essential terminology, the different types of meter, stanzas, sonnets, and so forth, Foster offers insight into the definition of poetry, “an exploration of language” that is simultaneously “the experiment and the laboratory where it takes place.” Foster has chosen his citations well, exploring Langston Hughes’s use of dialect and jazz in a discussion on rhythm, pointing out T.S. Eliot’s ingenious enjambment in “The Waste Land,” and using Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” as a catalyst for differentiating a poem’s author from its speaker. His discussion of symbolism is particularly effective and may help readers learn to actually enjoy the experience of interpreting a poem. He does not reference many contemporary poets, however, with the exception of former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins, and female poets are underrepresented. However, students struggling to understand poetry, or even English instructors struggling to teach it, could benefit immensely from Foster’s guidance. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Foster’s enthusiasm is infectious…he has clearly enjoyed teaching and sharing his love of literature with his students during his long career. How to Read Poetry Like a Professor is not unlike that freshman English class that everyone vies to enroll in—entertaining and informative without being intimidating. The curriculum is on point, and in the end, you’ll have the tools to truly ‘get’ poetry, with all its manifest themes and variations.

BookPage

“[An] accessible guide… [Foster’s] discussion of symbolism is particularly effective and may help readers learn to actually enjoy the experience of interpreting a poem… Students struggling to understand poetry, or even English instructors struggling to teach it, could benefit immensely from Foster’s guidance.” — Publishers Weekly

“Foster’s enthusiasm is infectious…he has clearly enjoyed teaching and sharing his love of literature with his students during his long career. How to Read Poetry Like a Professor is not unlike that freshman English class that everyone vies to enroll in—entertaining and informative without being intimidating. The curriculum is on point, and in the end, you’ll have the tools to truly ‘get’ poetry, with all its manifest themes and variations.” — BookPage

From the Publisher