How to Read Poetry Like a Professor

• Title: How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse
• Author: Thomas C. Foster
• Published: New York: Harper Perennial, 2018

I recently read his book How to Read Novels Like a Professor, so this is my next Foster installment.  I was not disappointed.  He continues to educate in a light-hearted manner.  Poetry is just a little different as in many can read a novel and for the most part jump right in with one go and get the gist of it.  But poetry is a different animal.  Personally, I love poetry.  Foster explores the definition of poetry, how it “uses language to take us to a place beyond language… and reading poetry requires more than just your brain.”[1]  Now this doesnt really give us a definition of poetry, but it gives you the idea that were dealing with a different type of animal.  Poetry is almost a different language, or it can appear that way.  I like to see it going beyond language.  I do agree with Foster that it is best to read poetry out loud.  Especially when first starting out with a new poem.  Also, a good piece of advice he gives is to read each poem more than once.  I believe you need to ponder a poem, let it sink in, absorb it and let the essence permeate your being.  Then contemplate what the poem says.  I guess it is like reading words someone wrote versus hearing them speak the same words.  With the former you have only the bare words to interpret their meaning with the latter you have all the body language to help you ascertain what they are saying between the lines.  Poetry attempts to arrange the words to help with some of that deeper meaning by how it is structured.

You can’t talk about poetry very well without getting into the technical mumbo jumbo of poetic structure.  Foster covers alliteration, consonance, assonance, dimeter, trimester, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, iamb, trochee, spondee, anapest, dactyl, and many more.  It is like learning a different language.  And yet it is not.  Foster does a good job relating poetry to music, which may help many people who think that poetry is so far beyond them.  I believe poetry talks to the soul and can elucidate truths.  Good poetry does anyways.  I also think people know and are familiar with more poetry than they may at first believe.

Foster gives us his own “inadequate stab,” as he calls it, definition of poetry.  “A poem is an experiment with and in language, an attempt to discover how best to capture its subject and make readers see it anew.”[2]  Putting aside his definition, the book is pretty straightforward with excellent examples and clarifications of what poetry is.  Sir Philip Sydney and Percy Bysshe Shelley each wrote a defense of poetry, that I recommend you read at least once, that is anything but a short definition of poetry.  I believe it is hard.  How could one define music, or the spoken word, or even drama?  The bottom line is that it is a way to communicate ideas.

I borrowed this book from the library, but I am going to put it on my wish list for books to own.  It will be good to read it again to reference (there is a nice index in the back!) and I think it would be a good one to loan out to others that I think would actually read it and profit from it.  Several new names were presented to me as I am more proficient in pre-1950 poets than modern ones, and I did watch some YouTube videos and make several Wikipedia searches to learn more about names that were unfamiliar to me.  Overall, I was impressed and satisfied with Foster’s presentation.  I look forward to reading more of his works.

About the Author[3]

Thomas C. Foster grew up in rural Ohio.  His early inspirations to literary works came from Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain.  He taught literature from 1975 until his retirement in 2014 with his last 27 years at the University of Michigan-Flint.  He has written the following books published under HarperCollins: How to Read Literature Like a Professor (2003, revised 2014), How to Read Novels Like a Professor (2008), Twenty-five Books that Shaped America (2011), How to Read Literature Like a Professor—for Kids (2012), Reading the Silver Screen (2016), and How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse (2018).  Less well-known works include Form and Society in Modern Literature (Northern Illinois University Press, 1988), Seamus Heaney (Twayne, 1989), and Understanding John Fowles (University of South Carolina Press, 1994).  He is still active writing books and you can find his blog site at thomascfoster.com.

[1] Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Poetry Like a Professor.  New York: Harper Perennial, 2018. Page 7.

[2] Ibid., page 33.

[3] Thomas C. Foster.  “Bio.”  Accessed May 13, 2019.  https://thomascfoster.com/home/bio/