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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.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9780062113788
- ISBN-10: 006211378X
- Publisher: Harper Perennial
- Publish Date: March 2018
- Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.4 pounds
- Page Count: 224
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Well Read: Just take it line by line
As a commercial genre, poetry has been on life support for decades. But as an art form, the reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. All manner of writers and readers still embrace the form, and we celebrate National Poetry Month each April, which has become the go-to time for publishing books about poetry. This year’s crop includes How to Read Poetry Like a Professor, in which Thomas C. Foster shares a lifetime’s worth of knowledge acquired and honed as a professor of English. Appropriately subtitled “A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse,” this user-friendly primer offers a nut-and-bolts tour into the mysteries of what Foster dubs “a (slightly) alien life-form.”
Foster believes that, for most people, the problem “isn’t so much not liking poetry as feeling somehow overmatched, as if it were a contest and the other side had better equipment and more skill.” How to Read Poetry Like a Professor is an attempt to level that uneven playing field, if you will. And like an athlete, the poetry reader needs to be well drilled in the fundamentals to fully succeed. Foster supplies that foundation, beginning with rudiments that many of us may have learned in school but have probably forgotten (if we were even paying attention in class that day). Basic concepts such as meter, assonance and consonance, rhythm and rhyme, couplets and quatrains are explored in fun, nonthreatening terms. Poetic forms, from sonnets to villanelles to odes, are explained. Patterns of words, the poet’s intentions, imagery and symbolism—all are neatly compacted into this concise and entertaining guide.
What Foster wants most is to demystify poetry. And with chapter titles such as “What the Heck Is It?” and “Is Verse Ever Really Free?” he is not afraid to have a little fun while supplying readers with solid information. He is a big advocate of reading poetry aloud and encourages us to set aside any self-conscious apprehension we may have about doing so: “In speaking it and hearing it, we learn to feel poetry,” he writes.
As one would expect, Foster draws on dozens of familiar examples to make his case, from the prologue of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare’s sonnets to the modernist works of e.e. cummings and Robert Frost, but he also reaches more far afield: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Billy Collins, Woody Guthrie and Paul Simon all make appearances. Disappointingly, examples by female poets are a bit scant, and they skew mostly toward the usual suspects—Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Christina Rossetti.
Poems, Foster writes, are “occasions to explore the divinity of experience and the miracle of imagination.” As in his bestselling book How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Foster’s enthusiasm is infectious—despite his Ivory Tower credentials, he is not some dusty academic, and 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.
This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Well Read: Just take it line by line
As a commercial genre, poetry has been on life support for decades. But as an art form, the reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. All manner of writers and readers still embrace the form, and we celebrate National Poetry Month each April, which has become the go-to time for publishing books about poetry. This year’s crop includes How to Read Poetry Like a Professor, in which Thomas C. Foster shares a lifetime’s worth of knowledge acquired and honed as a professor of English. Appropriately subtitled “A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse,” this user-friendly primer offers a nut-and-bolts tour into the mysteries of what Foster dubs “a (slightly) alien life-form.”
Foster believes that, for most people, the problem “isn’t so much not liking poetry as feeling somehow overmatched, as if it were a contest and the other side had better equipment and more skill.” How to Read Poetry Like a Professor is an attempt to level that uneven playing field, if you will. And like an athlete, the poetry reader needs to be well drilled in the fundamentals to fully succeed. Foster supplies that foundation, beginning with rudiments that many of us may have learned in school but have probably forgotten (if we were even paying attention in class that day). Basic concepts such as meter, assonance and consonance, rhythm and rhyme, couplets and quatrains are explored in fun, nonthreatening terms. Poetic forms, from sonnets to villanelles to odes, are explained. Patterns of words, the poet’s intentions, imagery and symbolism—all are neatly compacted into this concise and entertaining guide.
What Foster wants most is to demystify poetry. And with chapter titles such as “What the Heck Is It?” and “Is Verse Ever Really Free?” he is not afraid to have a little fun while supplying readers with solid information. He is a big advocate of reading poetry aloud and encourages us to set aside any self-conscious apprehension we may have about doing so: “In speaking it and hearing it, we learn to feel poetry,” he writes.
As one would expect, Foster draws on dozens of familiar examples to make his case, from the prologue of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare’s sonnets to the modernist works of e.e. cummings and Robert Frost, but he also reaches more far afield: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Billy Collins, Woody Guthrie and Paul Simon all make appearances. Disappointingly, examples by female poets are a bit scant, and they skew mostly toward the usual suspects—Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Christina Rossetti.
Poems, Foster writes, are “occasions to explore the divinity of experience and the miracle of imagination.” As in his bestselling book How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Foster’s enthusiasm is infectious—despite his Ivory Tower credentials, he is not some dusty academic, and 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.
This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.