Reading Poetry: An Introduction

by Tom Furniss

Reading Poetry offers a comprehensive and accessible guide to the art of reading poetry. Successive chapters introduce key skills and critical or theoretical issues, enabling users to read poetry with enjoyment, insight and an awareness of the implications of what they are doing. This new edition includes a new chapter on ‘Post-colonial Poetry’, a substantial increase in the number of end-of-chapter interactive exercises, and a comprehensive Glossary of poetic terms. Not just an add-on, the Glossary works as a key resource for the structuring of particular topics in any individual teaching or learning programme. Many of the exercises and interactive discussions develop not only the skills of competent close reading but also the necessary confidence and experience in locating historical and other contextual information through library or internet searches. The aim is to enhance readers' literary and scholarly competence – and to make it fun!

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Academic

648 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1996

About the author

Tom Furniss is Senior lecturer in English Studies at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. He is author of Edmund Burke's Aesthetic Ideology (1993) and Reading Poetry (20070, together with a number of articles on the politics and philoophy of the late Enlightenment. His interest in the Romantic writing of Scottish landscape is reflected in essays on the landscape and geology of the Trossachs and on James Hutton's 1788 'Theory of the Earth'.

Reviews

[Jamie Nickerson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Taught me how to analyze poems and prose.

[Indigo Wayworth · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not like this. Learned minimal, save for certain rhetorical and literary terms, and even then, the glossary is absolutely useless. Save your time, and don't if you have to read this for class? Godspeed, friends.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellently structured. As it moves through higher-level (and more difficult) topics in analysis, it introduces new and more modern critical approaches.