The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem

by Shira Wolosky

In The Art of Poetry, Shira Wolosky provides a dazzling introduction to an art whose emphasis on verbal music, wordplay, and dodging the merely literal makes it at once the most beguiling and most challenging of literary forms.

A uniquely comprehensive, step-by-step introduction to poetic form, The Art of Poetry moves progressively from smaller units such as the word, line, and image, to larger features such as verse forms and voice. In fourteen engaging, beautifully written chapters, Wolosky explores in depth how poetry does what it does while offering brilliant readings of some of the finest lyric poetry in the English and American traditions. Both readers new to poetry and poetry veterans will be moved and enlightened as Wolosky interprets work by William Shakespeare, John Donne, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, and others. The book includes a superb two-chapter discussion of the sonnet's form and history, and represents the first poetry guide to introduce gender as a basic element of analysis.

In contrast to many existing guides, which focus on selected formal aspects like metrics or present definitions and examples in a handbook format, The Art of Poetry covers the full landscape of poetry's subtle art while showing readers how to comprehend a poetic text in all its dimensions. Other special features include Wolosky's consideration of historical background for the developments she discusses, and the way her book is designed to acquaint or reacquaint readers with the core of the lyric tradition in English.

Lively, accessible, and original, The Art of Poetry will be a rich source of inspiration for students, general readers, and those who teach poetry.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Literature, Writing, School, Art

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Maru Kun]

Wallace Stevens, as well as being a great modernist poet, was Head of Legal at the Hartford Insurance Company. He wrote brilliant, refined poetry while working at a boring job in an industry that actively tries to be dull. We can reasonably assume that he spent many hours in the office bunking off and editing his poems.

The twenty first century is no longer so kind to the office poet. E-mails, blackberries, on-line training, town-halls, conference calls and the rest of that corporate baggage leave us little opportunity to develop our ars poetica. These days anyone who seriously wants to develop as a poet has no choice but to combine poetry and work.

With W H Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts and John Masefield's Cargoes as my inspiration here are my first attempts at defining a new poetic aesthetic of the office cubicle:

From now on all personnel matters will be dealt with in free verse

About suffering they were never wrong,
The HR department: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is photocopying or sending an e-mail or just reading a dull memo;
How, when the downsized are litigiously, passionately waiting
For their pink slips, there must always be
Outside contractors who did not specially want it to happen, surfing
On the internet outside the conference room.

All interaction with vendor management will be rhymed with a heavy and distinct meter.

Annie of procurement from distant Twickenham
Walking down the corridor in double quick time
With a cargo of staplers,
Memo pads and sticky notes,
Glue sticks, biro pens and heavy duty twine

As an aspiring office poet I have read a number of books on how to read poetry and this is certainly one of the best. A key strength is how it breaks down the poetic experience to its most basic concepts, giving each a separate chapter – words and diction, simile and metaphor, syntax and so on – and then fits these concepts together going from the simplest most basic level but building up to a more complex but cohesive whole.

There are a few points where the book gets a little academic and the eyes begin to glaze over, but the choice of poems is good and in the main the explanations very enlightening. In fact the book was so good I might actually go and read some poems instead of reading books about how to read poems.

Recommended for people struck by the muse while switching the printer off and on again.

[Huei-Jing]

I read it to help myself to write poem.
I've started to learn writing poem in English from 2010.
Actually, My native language is Chinese(major in Literature). English is second one. (Writing is better than speaking)

As a little monster and bi, mother monster inspired me to achieve something special:bilingual.
Um...can I call myself as a writer or poet? After all, I haven't published any books.

[Ed]

Not a book for the faint of heart,
The poems are rendered, torn apart,
Be warned! it may take many a session
To understand each verse dissection.

[Susan Fitzgerald]

A first-rate introduction to reading poetry. I especially appreciated the approach: from the smallest component, the word, expanding to syntax, and then exploring the topics of simile and metaphor and voice, before moving on to variations, personification, rhyme, meter, sounds and tropes. I feel better situated and grounded to begin the joy of reading a poem. I would have liked an overview of the history of poetry. She mentions "periods" (romantic, modern, post-modern, symbolic, etc), but I don't know when those were and what their changes/improvements/variations were. Perhaps too much for one book. Nonetheless, to start, highly recommend.

[Caleb Chan]

Read to bolster English essay writing. Very helpful! Enjoy poetry more now

[Marbenele]

Very helpful and useful to learn how to read a poem and thus how to write it.

[Ellen]

Wolosky opens up a poem to multiples of meaning that are unimaginable in my first reading of the poem. She shows how each area of poesy helps interpret the poem, from individual words, syntax and the poetic line, images - simile and metaphor, metaphor and the sonnet, verse forms - the sonnet, poetic conventions, more verse forms, personification, poetic voice, gender and poetic voice, poetic rhythm - meter, poetic rhythm - sound and rhyme, rhetoric - more tropes, and something she calls incomplete figures in the chapter Incomplete Figures and the Art of Reading. Many of the poems she elucidates are poems I have read for years. I had no idea so very, very much was in these verses. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants a much richer experience in ready poetry.

[♡]

So here's the deal. I skipped maybe 3 chapters of this book either because we didn't cover them in class or because I was lazy. So technically I didn't read it cover to cover. BUT it took a big chunk of time because it's somewhat dense so I'm counting it toward my "read" books.

So for the actual review part. Personally, I wouldn't have picked this up to read of my own volition. Not that I don't enjoy studying literature, but I don't tend to read things like this in my free time. For the class I'm taking this book was a giant help. We've studied mainly poetry and the book has given us a lot of avenues of thought for analysis. Overall, it was a pretty useful tool to learn how to analyze poetry in greater depth.

[Angelusblanc]

It was very clear and informative until about the last couple of chapters. Chapter 14 however, perhaps because of its topic as well as its relation to modernist and post structuralist issues is a bit confusing and provides rather a bad ending to an otherwise satisfactory and insightful book.

[Gwendolyn Neal]

Engaging and comprehensive introduction to poetry. Very informative, highly recommended.

[Mike Bright]

Full disclosure - I am deeply on the technical side of the academic world (computer engineering). So poetry has always been a struggle for me. I was talking with an English professor about how to understand poetry, and he recommended this book.

Wow! Dr. Wolosky is great. Each chapter breaks down a different piece of poetry (e.g. individual words, phrases, structure, rhyme, rhythm, etc. She gives all the appropriate technical terms (many of which seem silly to me - just call it what it is), but they do not distract from the explanations. As she explains each concept, she gives a poem (or poem fragment) to illustrate. Everything made good sense and it all held together well (for me).

I am clearly still a poetic beginner, but I think with a few more books that break down some poems, I might actually find some enjoyment in this part of literature. Thank you Dr. Wolosky.

[Sean Connolly]

So I am a college student now! I’m loving my Arts and Humanities course and the main reason definitely being the people I’ve met and become friends with. This is the first thing I’ve read for my course, for help with my Poetry class and I purely read it because our lecturer strongly suggested doing so. I’ve definitely learned new things about poetry as a form of writing and I do feel that reading this has helped me to understand the intricacies of writing poems on a deeper level, so I’m grateful for that. However this book was mainly just a bit of a task to get through for me, and felt very repetitive or overly complex at times. I’ve made some notes throughout so hopefully I can apply some things I’ve learned from it.

[Kirby Chiu]

A really excellent manual. If you haven't read all too much poetry, you go into it wondering how one book alone can enliven the experience for you - but this book has transformed the process for me. It gives you an excellent toolkit through which to approach any poems, and it contains a set of poetic commentaries which are themselves fascinating.

This book focuses on poetry's form, and is successful at conveying poetry's highly intentional, dense use of language - a social technology for producing effects in the reader. However, it balances this with some attention paid to the historical context of various poetic forms, giving the reader a good sense of tradition and innovation in poetry.

[Charles Anderson]

An engaging guide to poetry and its interpretation. It uses a wide selection of example poems, including some classics, to illustrate the many techniques used by great poets.

I did sometimes wonder whether the poets themselves would have been aware of the hidden meanings and associations that Wolosky manages to find in their works.

Unfortunately free verse is barely touched on. I'd have liked to see the author critique some of the more modern poems I come across, where I can struggle to find any meaning or significance at all. It was published in 2001 though.

All in all a useful and enjoyable book.

[Adam Higgins]

Good analysis of poems, i didnt find it as entertaining as i wouldve liked, although of course its an educational book, not a thriller, there were seriously moments where i was excited about the meanings if the poems, and how amazing they are, but the tone of the analysis just killed that with how flat and, at times, difficult to understand it was.

[Swanny]

Very enlightening and interesting. Felt like many terms could have been explained more clearly. Outright disagreed with some parts sin the chapter on meter. Last few chapters were very dry and difficult to understand. Enjoy it a lot overall, don't recommend binge-reading in a single week.

[percy]

not bad; i learnt a couple things, but it didn’t say much that similar books don’t (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but you probably won’t gain loads from reading it if you’ve already read another book about reading poetry)

[Amy]

Very useful in helping me to analyse poetry, I'll be sure to use it again in the future!

[Maddy]

read 4 class 👁️👄👁️ but I liked it

[Sekaiichi]

Diction, couplet, stanza nedir şiirler üzerinden örnekler vererek açıklanmış.

Öncesinde edebiyat tarihiyle alakalı bilgileri tazelemek ya da eşlikçi bi kitap bulundurmak gerekebilir.

[Seth Arnopole]

The Art of Poetry contains the best explanation (with examples) of the components, devices, and structures of poetry I’ve ever read.

[Ryan]

Slow reading, but good reading.

[Esther]

This book is fascinating, readable and helpful to someone (like me) who is frequently mystified by poetry. The author explains things brilliantly so you don't feel: 'That's fine for her but I'm never going to be able to understand this by myself.' She introduces concepts, gives examples and uses poems to illustrate in context. However, her interpretations of the poems are not phrased as closed or definitive. They are framed as discussions - questioning and exploratory - so you feel you are being taken on a thought-journey with her.

[Tandava Graham]

There are some good analyses of poems in here, and I think I learned something from it. I also think I would have learned more if I had more patience with the author's prose, which I found somewhat snooze-inducing.

[Campbell Wiersma]

A really wonderful book to learn how to attend to and close read poetry- the best one I have read so far! It would also be helpful in learning which elements/themes/motifs to include in writing one's own poetry.

[Rose]

821 Wol

[Garrii]

mañana me van a destruir

[Sarah]

This was a great book on the insight on poetic theory

[malin]

thank u for (hopefully) helping me pass my exams