Book Review: How to Read a Poem June 15
So, I went to a big academic conference. And I had a booth in the trade fair bit, which is called the Book Fair because it is mostly publishers. And I spent the entire week staring at the Wiley/Blackwell booth and maybe spent some money on the last day.
One of those books was How to Read a Poem by Terry Eagleton.
Eagleton is a big cheese literary critic (nay, theorist) in England. But this book is written for students near the beginning of their undergraduate studies and for the general reader. I think you’d have to be the kind of general reader that likes academic writing, but this is probably a fair description. And he does say that you can start at chapter 4 if you want to skip his discussion of theoretical debates.
I’m the kind of person that actually finds the discussion of debates in literary theory helpful. Because I know that literary criticism, like other forms of academic analysis, takes place in the context of debates. So it is helpful for me to have a sense of what is at stake in those debates. Eagleton’s first few chapters help with that enormously, while attending to the specific case of poetry.
They also situate certain trends in poetry historically. The influence of the Romantics on our everyday notions of what poetry should be (or at least mine) was particularly enlightening. And freeing. As was the discussion of the historical shift in the meaning (and moral/political value) of “rhetoric”.
He uses examples throughout to illustrate his points and kind of walk you through the particular aspect of literary criticism that he is dealing with. And then the last chapter walks you through 4 poems from different periods.
I think I’ve mentioned before that I never “got” literature in high school and university. And I’m particularly lost when it comes to poetry. But this book really helped me.
Just to reassure you, despite the fact that he’s a big cheese literary theorist, here is his definition of a poem.
A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or wod processor, who decides where the lines should end. (p. 25)
Chapter 2 goes through that definition. In addition to explaining what he means by each term –”fictional”, “verbally inventive”, “moral”– he also talks about why his definition doesn’t include anything about rhyme, rhythm, metre, and all that other stuff we associate with poetry.
All his points are illustrated with appropriate examples. I particularly enjoyed the introduction to the section on the term “fiction” (which follows that on the term “moral”).
The distinction between the empirical and the moral is not the same as the difference between fact and fiction. There are plenty of moral statements, such as ‘certain members of the Royal Family are ofish individuals of philistine tastes and remarkably low intelligence’, which are not fictional — not only because they are true, but because they belong to the real world rather than to poems and novels.
There are, of course, poetic examples, as well.
This is not the kind of book I would give to my child to read. Or at least not until she is solidly advanced in high-school level English. However, I have found it very helpful in my quest to figure out what the goal of high-school English might be. What kind of thinking do I want to nurture in my daughter? And how could studying poetry help with that?
It is also helpful in making me more comfortable with poetry in general. A useful skill since Freya seems to be a poet (among other things) and it would be nice to be able to appreciate that in more than a purely parental pride kind of way. She thinks the title of the book is nuts, btw. Who needs to be taught that?
Well, I do need to be taught how to read a poem. And I’m sure others do, too. And this book helped me enormously.
BTW, there is a Search Inside feature for this book on Amazon. The table of contents gives a good sense of what is covered and there is a substantial chunk of Chapter 1 available.



