How Does a Poem Mean?

by John Ciardi, Miller Williams

Poetry textbook

Genres: Poetry, Writing, Nonfiction, Language, Literature, Teaching, Literary Criticism

408 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

John Anthony Ciardi was an American poet, translator, editor, writer and etymologist.

Reviews

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A more useful way of asking the question is How does a poem mean? Why does it build itself into a form out of images, ideas, rhythms? How do these elements become the meaning? How are they inseparable from the meaning?”

Well now I feel like I’ve been to school. They do not make textbooks like this anymore. I am tempted to seek out the other books in this collection “An Introduction to Literature: In Four Parts,” but they will be hard if not impossible to find. I spent over five months with this book and it was indeed an education. Ciardi defines, describes, illustrates and illuminates.

I was inspired by
"When We Two Parted" by Lord Byron (https://poets.org/poem/when-we-two-pa...),
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...),
"The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...),
and so many others.

I studied the difference between a trochee (two syllable section, accented followed by unaccented) and an anapest (three syllable section, two unaccented followed by accented); felt the difference between consonant rhymes and vowel rhymes; and learned to distinguish blank verse (regular meter but unrhymed) from free verse (irregular meter too).

I considered the many things that go into word choice and phrasing, from overtones and undertones to Lewis Carroll’s critique of Victorian morality. And this:
“The musicality of good phrasing is obvious at a glance. ‘Saint George and the Dragon for Merrie England’ is not simply a statement; it is a rhythmic unit to which a man on a horse can swing his sword arm.”

My favorite sections were the last two, about “motion” and “countermotion.” I didn’t realize there was a “rest” in poetry, like in music, called a “caesura.” It was fascinating to see how a poet can play lines and phrases off one another within a poem and use these techniques to accomplish a specific effect.

This was a wonderful guide to live with for a long time, and I think I’ll miss it.

“A true poem is endless in being not a meaning but an act of existence.”

[Carol Bakker · Rating 4 out of 5]

~ The question to put to the poem is not "What does it mean?" but "How does it mean?"
"What does it mean?" inevitably invites paraphrase and inevitably leads away from the poem.
"How does it mean?" is best asked by absorbing the poetic structure as a poetic structure, i.e., as a countermotion across a silence, and thus leads the analysis to the poem itself. ~

Often, Ciardi's commentary so delighted me that I gurgled with glee. His chapter, The Words of Poetry, is remarkable with my multitudinous marks. Ciardi delivers, in Emily Dickinson's words, "the desirable gooseflesh which is poetry."

But I did not love all the poems. I had to push myself through quite a few with a sense of relief dominant over a sense of reward when finished.

This book will remain on my shelf of poetry. I look forward to revisiting it with the freedom to skip any parts I wish. I've added Ciardi to my Fantasy Teacher Team (Wendell Berry teaching literature and David McCullough teaching History are some others).

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

2022 Review: I don't know why I keep checking this book out from the library instead of buying it. I am just stunned by the insight. Ciardi presents poetry with a sense of playfulness and delight, and this delight is only enriched by his depth of knowledge. I love to learn from people who not only know but love their subject, because their insights invite me towards both deeper appreciation and deeper understanding. This is the second time I've absolutely carried this book around with me, reading and re-reading favorite passages, marking favorite lines (with book darts! I'm not a monster marking up library books!), and studying the poems like someone is going to grade me on my insights. It's embarrassing how much I love this book.

2014 Review:
I have always struggled to quantify and explain what I like and don't like in a poem. This brilliant book used some of my favorite poems to reveal new layers of meaningfulness and to explain how poetry does what it does. I'll admit to skipping many of the poems so I could focus on his insights about patterns but I did take embarrassingly copious notes...for my own edification? For my students? I don't know. I just felt compelled to remember all the insight I gained from this book, particularly his advice about word choice in poetry(muscularity, irreducibility, memorableness), how to use modifiers (goes beyond the familiar "get rid of adverbs" advice to explain when, how, and how often to use modifiers), his definition of dominant vs. scattered imagery, and his final chapter on the fulcrum.

[Ardyth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've tried several poetry appreciation books, and they left me just as confused as school lessons did. I'd reached a point of believing poetry was totally beyond me.

But Ciardi's book is different, and my interest in this art is rekindled.

Rather than begin with the engineering details typical of this field -- a dry discussion of meter and feet (yawn) or the tehnical layout of a sonnet form (yawn) -- Ciardi begins with a rant against Gradgrind and follows quickly with a skip through humorous verse, nonsense verse and folk ballads... all of these a decidedly more inviting intro than Shakespeare.

Once the reader is convinced that this art can (should) be delightful, Ciardi digs into the question of how poets work their magic. An unusual order which I appreciated as a mostly-prose reader:

... Dual meanings (literal force and symbolic force)

... Other delights of words as words (denotation, connotation, physical feeling, history of usage, etymology)

... the sympathetic contract between poet and reader (tone, attitude, when and how the contract fails)

... metaphoric images (sensory meanings and emotional meanings, image's history as part of its connotation)

... motion of a poem (we finally get to meter / alliteration / etc, how these provide pace and emphasis, how this affects the poem's meaning)

... countermotion (changes in pace and/or diction = changes in tone and/or attitude)

Ciardi occasionally provides inferior-by-design edits to a poem as part of demonstrating a point about how the poem works, which I found helpful.

I'm certainly no expert on poetry because of one book, but I do feel better equipped to tell the difference between meh poetry vs skilful poetry I don't quite "get" -- and that's not nothing!

Highly recommend.

[Poiema · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've always loved poetry but had never delved into its structure or taken a college course on the subject. This book filled in the gaps for me. Written by John Ciardi, aka "Mr. Poet," this book gave opportunity to see poetry as more than just pretty words. I learned about rhythm and meter and motion and silences and fulcrums and so many other aspects relating to the structure of poetry. I think the author's point was always that poetry is to be experienced, not just read and analyzed. Many times the structure of the poem displays hidden meanings that go way beyond language; the architecture speaks as loudly as the words.

This is a l-o-n-g book and I took a LONG time getting through it. In fact, I kept it at my bedside for a couple of years and dipped into it when I wanted to close the day with poetry. I was introduced to many different genres, and interspersed throughout were exercises and observational tools that enhanced my understanding considerably. Never, never did the author tell what the poem "meant." He succeeded in presenting poetry in a whole different light, beyond superficial enjoyment.

I did find portions of this book useful, not only for myself but for my high school (homeschool) students. We didn't use it cover-to-cover, but selected portions that were applicable to our current studies. Highly recommended.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the fact that there are many poems in this book that still mystify me, I think I learned quite a bit about the devices poets use that allow their meaning to shine through their words. It made me want to read more poetry.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

the first poetry book I ever read (10th grade!) returns via the Library Book Sale. A classic of New Criticism!

[SugaredBlossom · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book unlocked the true appreciation of poetry for me. I had always liked poetry just fine, but this opened my eyes to the mastery of poetry, to the thought and depth that goes into writing it and reading it. Suffice to say I wasn't a poet, but this book made me want to be one, made me understand and get swept away in the magic of it all. It's taught me more than my college-level poetry class! It's not often that you read a textbook that changes your viewpoint drastically, and this is one of them. I cannot recommend it enough, whether you have an interest in the art form or not.

[Alan Gerstle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ciardi was a serious poet, translator of poetry, and poetry teacher. More perspicacious than many of his colleagues, he announced that he didn't want to follow the 'planned poverty' career route of many poets, so, after translating Dante, he sold real estate for a while to boost his savings. Smart guy. In his time, a college lecturer made about $10,000-$15,000 a year. This book is accessible for anyone that enjoys well crafted poetry but eschews the academic industry's use of pedantry, and contains a diverse selection of poems. It must be a blessing not to feel compelled to join the ranks of b.s. artists that the academies churn out.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

For someone like me, who wants to appreciate poetry but likes to have the structure of something broken down and explained, this was perfect. In this book are the mechanics of poetry followed by lots and lots (really too many) of poems.

[Daniel Chaikin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four and half months later I finished this, reading maybe 4 pages a day in bed before I went to sleep.

For most of the book I thought it was nothing special, just a dated text book with a lot of classic poetry. This wasn't a bad thing. Thanks to this book I read, for the first time:

- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Colleridge
- The Love Song of Alfred Profrock by T.S. Elliot
- Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats
- L'Allegro and Il Penseroso by John Milton

And many others. Those just stand out.

But 3/4 through Ciardi starts to cover poetic metrics and fulcrums. I think I had never covered this before. I found this section fascinating. Maybe I just needed an intro into this stuff, or maybe he did it well. But that part made the book much more rewarding.

This is a 1975 edition of a Ciardi's 1959 original. It's updated with at-the-time recent poetry. Don't expect many women.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book in my parents' basement when I was in about 8th grade. It must have been a textbook for a class my mother took in college, because her bubbly cursive is all over it. The critical discussions about the poetry are pretty flimsy at best, but this is a marvelous collection of works and is almost entirely responsible for kick-starting my love of poetry. The copy, now doubly dog-eared, lives with me in Brooklyn.

[Richard Magahiz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I requested this fifty-year-old textbook from my library based on what Matthew Zapruder wrote about it in his book Why Poetry along with my longstanding admiration for Ciardi's translations of Dante. In it the authors talk about the difficulties readers have getting at what a poem is all about. There are clues from the verse form, the choice of words, the images used, and the interplay of ideas, each of which gets a section in this work. I think it was probably intended for undergraduate poetry classes and popular enough to merit a second edition after its original publication in the late 1950s. The majority of the poems are from the canon of English writers of the last few centuries, but there are some mid-twentieth century works also, though the selection is not as diverse as what a reader might be sued to today. After some of the reprinted poems, the authors pose some open-ended questions designed to get the reader thinking about the techniques employed by poets to convey meaning, and to compare different poems according to how they implement these patterns for the kind of effect they are after. There were a few original unusual poems modeled after an original only with some changes in the words, not claiming to be great works, but instructive for what is gained or lost with the changes. There were some poems where the attitude of the ones collecting them were not entirely favorable, an instructional technique I don't remember seeing in other books about prosody.

Overall I think the book holds up pretty well, though if someone were thinking of adapting it for a third edition now I am sure there would be many changes. There was a lot of talk about meter in the second half of the book which I mostly skimmed over, because beyond blank verse and ballad meters I personally don't have a lot to do with that kind of structure. There was no mention of prose poetry and only a short section devoted to poems from the Far East and English poetry inspired by those traditions. I thought the selection of poems was quite good, with a number of poems I didn't know even if they were written by people I'd heard of before. Someone knowledgeable with the field will be likely to notice many aspects not only of poetry but of literary culture in general which are a Big Deal now but simply lacking in this text that was modern in the 1970s. But having read this book through one time (skimming some sections, including entire poems, depending on my whim), I don't have any special hankering to have a copy on my shelves to refer to in the future.

[Tandava Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good premise here, which is the idea that asking "what" a poem means is taking the wrong approach. That just leads to a bland summation and the thought that you then know what's going on. Rather, one should ask "how" a poem means. By closely considering how it achieves all its effects, you get a deeper understanding and appreciation of it, while still interacting with it directly, rather than with some imposed or assumed meaning.

This is definitely a textbook, and you'd get the most out of it if you actually answer all the study questions, work through all the examples, etc. And the authors are very willing to just give you pages and pages of poems to study without additional commentary. I didn't particularly care for that, since I already have plenty of anthologies, and I was more interested in reading this for their comments. But still, there's lots of good stuff in there, though I don't know that I could have handled it as my first book on studying poetry. Glad I'd read The Ode Less Travelled previously, which is a much friendlier way to get the basics.

- - - UPDATE - - -

Having just reread this five years after I wrote that first review, I still agree with what I said, but I think I also appreciate this book much more now. I can tell that the basic concepts I got out of it have definitely influenced my approach to poetry, and the extra years of experience help me get more out of the book the second time around. Also, as picky as I am, I can tell that I have a broader appreciation for poetry in general now. (I can tell because I recognize a lot of poems that I added from this book to my personal collection of favorites the first time around, but I added even more this time, which I didn't particularly notice or care for before.)

[Derek Bosshard]

That’s a heck of a textbook. The first chapter (which shares the book’s title) should maybe be mandatory reading for anyone who teaches any kind of literature. One of my favorite things that Ciardi does in that chapter is emphasize the importance of play when it comes to reading or teaching ‘difficult’ poetry. He talks about how play is the first level of involvement in most difficult tasks, especially sports or hobbies. For example, 'chess is a play activity, yet it is play only because the players deliberately make the game difficult in order to overcome the difficulties. The equation is simple: no difficulty, no fun. No chess player finds any real pleasure in playing an obviously inferior opponent. Every game ever invented by mankind is a way of making things hard for the fun of it.' A simple observation but also a helpful framing device for both teachers and students.

Beyond that, I wouldn't point someone here as a starting point for getting into poetry, and most of what Ciardi presents isn’t going to be directly accessible to my high school students, but it’s definitely a great resource for teachers. (I found an affordable old copy at Powell’s, and I’m nervous that I’m in danger of turning back to this book so often that I’m going to destroy it.)

[Christopher Gow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty awesome -- The major point is that a poem means more than its paraphrase, that there is always something communicated by a poem (by its performance) that can't be explained in prose or translated into another form. Most of the book is an explanation (with tons of helpful examples) of how the elements of a poem work to establish this larger meaning.

I wish there were a book like this for every art form

[Kenton Yee · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first read this, I thought it was a fantastic intro to poetry basics. However, now I realize it is somewhat formal and obsolete compared to more contemporary poetry texts. Not a lot about contemporary language or experimental non-formal verse in here for example. Still a worthwhile introductory college textbook though.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

c 1959, old school, and better than more recent 101's by far. Focusing on How, not What, Ciardi sets a goal of explaining poetry's implicit capacities and methods. Using multiple examples to clarify his instructions and stress the nature of a poem's "quality", he has provided a guide to poetry that will never become out of date.

[Jenny Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've got to admit: this book sometimes was a bit over my head. That said, I deeply appreciated the vast selection of examples included in the text. And I sort of love that Ciardi did not pull punches when he thought something didn't work in a poem. I believe you can learn a lot from great poetry, but it's also really helpful to see clear examples of mistakes.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thorough, wide-ranging. Heavy going in places, will need a re-read.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

NOT a teaching book, but a book that has been oh-so-helpful as I start teaching AP Lit this year.

[Rosa]

Miller Williams: “Sweet Corn Bread.”

[Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Category: Books it's hard to say whether you "read" or not.

Part textbook (though that sounds derogatory) on how to read poetry and what makes it good, part anthology organized by the topic being discussed. I discovered a substantial collection of poems I hadn't read before and was glad to read. I also was pushed to think about reading (and writing) in ways I hadn't heard articulated before. If I were ever to teach a class on poetry, I would revisit this first.

Read about half with careful attention to detail, and skimmed the second half. Worth revisiting when I cure my addiction to keeping library books past their due.

[Mike Duron · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the first serious (but thoroughly enjoyable) books on poetry I ever read. I was first exposed to it in my late teens and have gone back to it many times throughout the years. Ciardi leaves you feeling like you've just spent time in conversation with a genius who knows poetry inside and out -- which he was, and he did. This is certainly requisite reading for any serious student of poetry.

[Jonathan Lovelace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many of the poems chosen as illustrations are ones I found myself skipping over, either because of their sheer length or because they looked more modernist than I like, but the explanatory prose was almost all very sensible, including some points that gave insight on why I instinctively like some particular poems, and bears much thinking on both as a reader of poetry and as a poet. I really need to reread this with a pad in hand and take notes.

[Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

So far, so good. Making the case that the form of poetry is as crucial to its understanding as the content, and that they can never be divorced. Only dipping in at the moment, but looking forward to a deeper read soon.

[Abigail King]

I am always in the middle of five or six books of poetry, but as the process of "finishing" the books is so completely non-linear I don't usually mention them on my currently reading list. Just to say.

[Mick Natco · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is irrelevant to ask "what does a poem mean".
I've always loved poetry. And have written some.
This book taught me how to read a poem, something I thought I knew how to do.
Boy was I wrong. Every poem I read now is so much more vibrant.
A must read.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found Ciardi refreshing in his explanation of how to understand poetry. I was taking a poetry class under Weiss at Deere-Pierce College in Athens then and liked Ciardi so much that l later read all three volumes of his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy.

[Gilbert Wesley Purdy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cut my poetic teeth on this book. A lot of great examples illustrate the various aspects of writing poetry. It's fun to read the poems and equally to read the analysis of their various strengths and the tools of the craft that they employ.