Introduction to Poetry

English 325             Spring 2012

Five Basic Guidelines for Reading Poetry

1. Read slowly. Poetry is often very condensed, and therefore you can't plow through it at maximum velocity. In a culture addicted to speed, it can be hard to slow down, but it's essential that you do so if you're going to get the most from poetry.

2. Read repeatedly. We can "get" an editorial or an essay or a newspaper article on a single reading and not really profit from looking at it again, but with poems, as with any work of art, repeated attention pays increasing dividends. If you don't really understand a piece you're reading, make an hypothesis about the meaning, jot down that hypothesis and any questions you have, and test your hypothesis by reading again, and if necessary again. It is very normal not to really get a poem on first reading through it.

3. Read aloud. To read a poem silently is like listening to music by reading a score. In the same way, we can't expect a poem to come fully alive if we read it silently. Whenever you can, read poetry aloud. When at all possible, listen to an author reading her own poetry; many poets (and not just American ones) can be heard reading at the Academy of American Poets site. People got their poetry orally for thousands of years up until the invention of the printing press; we've only been reading silently a very short time, relatively speaking. There's a second reason for reading aloud, which is that we'll stumble over a word or phrase or passage that we don't understand. If we don't understand it, we won't know how to read it, and that's always valuable information. Those awkward moments are sure signs we need to ponder that word or phrase or passage.

4. Find the emotional center. Remember that your goal is NOT discovering hidden meanings or cracking a difficult code or finding symbols or unlocking keys or any of those other horrible things high school teachers tortured generations of students with. Your goal, always, is a human experience: understanding the emotions and thoughts of other people, expanding your range of sympathies, and becoming more empathetic and knowledgeable about what it means to be a human being.

5. Understand the speaker. This is a corollary to Rule 4. Every time you encounter a new poem, remember that you're meeting a person who either has something to tell you or who is saying or thinking something you're able to overhear. The better you get to know the speaker, the more you'll understand the poem, so keep asking yourself about the speaker-just as you would in meeting any other new person. What is this person like? Why is this person speaking? What event(s) or emotion(s) have prompted the person to speak? What is this person's mood? Serious? Playful? Philosophical? Sarcastic? What kind of language does this person use? If this person has an agenda, what is it? One of the most important things about poetry is that it allows us, as few other things do, the experience of being inside the skins of other people, often people amazingly different from ourselves. Thus we gain in sympathy and empathy and in our knowledge and experience of the world. Our lives then become richer, which is part of what Wallace Stevens meant by saying that "Poetry helps people live better lives."