Customer Reviews

How to Read a Poem

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In mostly eschewing theoretic jargon, or by giving clear examples to explain the jargon used, Eagleton has written an excellent guide for the academic reader. I stipulate this qualification because the mythical Common Reader would probably be put off by the detailed explanation of such things as the theories of the Russian Formalists and their disciples that take up several chapters. While Eagleton remains a proud card-carrying Theorist (an academic species he feels has been grossly misunderstood), he does the heavy lifting for the reader so, with only a modicum of effort, his arguments can usually be easily followed.

All this would be beside the point unless he had some illuminating things to say about the structure of poetry and how to approach the critical reading of a poem. Happily he does, which makes this short volume repay any effort it takes to read.

Unlike Harold Bloom, he expects little on faith from the reader and makes the necessary effort to convince you of his points. And although his Marxist sentiments are frequently in evidence, he never becomes heavy-handed and uses his bias more for flavoring than the meal itself.

So like many critical guides, what your needs are going in will determine your satisfaction coming out. For the general reader, Stephen Fry's "The Ode Less Travelled" might be a better fit. For the serious student of literature, Mr. Eagleton's guide is a worthwhile investment.

Eagleton writes well, no one denies that. And he's got some trenchant observations and good analytical skills. But his books do seem to pump out very familiar themes to an Eagleton reader, such as Marxist literary criticism and the Russian Formalists, with very little variations on those themes. And he seems to over-elaborate many sentences and many arguments, fiddling around with a single idea but expressing it in twenty different ways, one after another, swooning with uncertain effects at times. The book is at its most superfluous in the chapter on Russian formalists (chapter 3), which could be amputated painlessly. One could also lop off chapter 1 with little inconvenience, and weed off from Chapter 4 anything other than Eagleton's close readings. What would be left after doing all that is a superb work of applied literary criticism. And some readings ARE superb. He applies finely-tuned reading techniques to a number of poets, and the result is a thrilling encounter with multiple meanings, provocative interpretations, an array of techniques and effects working deftly together. In short, what studying literature is all about. Just for that, How to Read a Poem is worth it. And for brilliant phrases like this one: "In everyday life, talking about imaginary people as though they were real is known as psychosis; in universities, it is known as literary criticism" (p. 22).

What a feast one finds here for the lover and budding lover of poetry. This fascinating and engaging book, complex but clear, is designed as an introduction to poetry for both students and interested readers, but is rather more than that. It begins with interesting discussions on the 'end of criticism,' 'politics and rhetoric,' the 'death of experience' and 'imagination.' From here, Eagleton dives into poetry's relations: to prose, morality, fiction, pragmatism and language. A look at the Formalists is followed by an extended discussion on meaning and form. Eagleton then provides some discussion of poetry in performance and two American examples of critical analysis before walking us through the reader's and analyst's magic land of measures for exploration and enjoyment - a poem's tone, mood, intensity, texture, ambiguity, rhyme, rythm and meter, imagery, syntax, grammar and punctuation. He ends the book with a separate section in which he discusses four nature poems. Overall, a wonderful book of a timeless quality, useful as a guide for both the reader and the writer. I found this book so helpful as a guide to modern poetry criticism and analysis.

I think this may be a book for people who have bought; read and enjoyed poetry beyond the duties of formal education. Terry Eagleton brings so much more to the reading of a poem -and still rings true.

Terry Eagleton believes that literary criticism - scrupulously close reading and sensitivity to questions of form - is a dying art and has written this book to revive it. The book can be broadly divided into an examination of the theory of the Russian Formalists, an exploration of the relationship between form and content and a practical explanation of the tools the poet uses in his art.

Eagleton's explanation of the Russian Formalists is a model of clarity. In eleven pages he manages to explain the the theory and practice of the school in a way that is interesting and comprehensible to the lay reader while respecting the complexity of the theory. He explains how information flows from deviation from the regular, how words in poems form parts of multiple systems, and how the interaction of those systems, in highlighting similarities and differences, draws the maximum meaning from the words used.

Eagleton then examines content (what a poem says) and form (how it says it). He demonstrates how the elegant form of Grey's 'Elegy in a Church Courtyard' works against its content - the dire situation portrayed, and how the sheer excellence of the form in Yeats' 'Coole Park and Ballylee' transcends the content, the lament for the loss of a society that can produce such excellence. He demonstrates how the form of Derek Mahon's 'Disused Shed in County Wexford' dominates the content, how the poet successfully invokes through form the horror and tragedy of the holocaust while his content uses the merely everyday, an abandoned shed in rural Ireland and mushrooms.

Eagleton then explores the tools of the poet, the sources of a poem's meaning. He outlines how the meaning of a poem is found in its tone, mood and pitch. For example there is no mistaking the tone and pitch intended by George Herbert in his line "I struck the board and cried, 'No more;/ I will abroad!' nor the near whisper suitable for Tennyson's lines 'Be near me when the light is low,/ when the blood creeps, and the nerves prick.' Eagleton finds a more subtle source of poetic meaning in a poem's texture; how a poem weaves its various sounds into palpable patterns, citing Tennyson's 'Lotus Eaters' and its avoidance of sharp consonants in favour of a softer, more sibilant sounds to re-enact the somnolent state of the lotus eaters. He outlines how poets use punctuation to convey meaning, such as the seven line long sentence Yeats uses in 'Coole Park and Ballylee' following immediately by a short one line sentence 'to show that the poet has some breath left in him even after this virtuous display.' He outlines the deep meanings and ambivalence that can be conveyed by grammar, citing the alternative meanings of T.S. Eliot's 'Whispers of Immortality' depending on whether 'leaned' is the past tense of lean or the past participle. He explores how poets use rhyme, explaining how para-rhymes in Wilfrid Owen's 'Insensibility' convey how everything is awry, off-key, out of kilter in the war which the poem describes. Discussing rhythm he points out how the line 'It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way' in Smith's 'Not Waving but Drowning' breaks the established rhythm to give a sense of flurried, disorganised chatter.

All this is conveyed with an evidently deep, though lightly carried, learning and with Eagleton's characteristic wicked sense of humour: "this insensitivity to the texture and rhythm of our speech is essential to our practical lives. There is no point in shouting 'Fire!' in a cinema if the audience are simply going to linger over the delectable contrast between the violently stabbing F and the swooning, long drawn-out vowel.", "They may be having a profound experience for some other reason (perhaps they are...thrusting red-hot needles into an effigy of Donald Trump)."