How to Read Poetry Like a Professor

February 5, 2018
Literary critic Foster (How to Read Literature Like a Professor) explicates the fundamentals of reading and understanding poetry in this accessible guide designed for the lay audience. He addresses the common anxieties expressed by readers unfamiliar with poetry (i.e., “I don’t understand it”), and responds with patient and frequently witty explanation. In addition to breaking down essential terminology, the different types of meter, stanzas, sonnets, and so forth, Foster offers insight into the definition of poetry, “an exploration of language” that is simultaneously “the experiment and the laboratory where it takes place.” Foster has chosen his citations well, exploring Langston Hughes’s use of dialect and jazz in a discussion on rhythm, pointing out T.S. Eliot’s ingenious enjambment in “The Waste Land,” and using Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” as a catalyst for differentiating a poem’s author from its speaker. His discussion of symbolism is particularly effective and may help readers learn to actually enjoy the experience of interpreting a poem. He does not reference many contemporary poets, however, with the exception of former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins, and female poets are underrepresented. However, students struggling to understand poetry, or even English instructors struggling to teach it, could benefit immensely from Foster’s guidance.

March 1, 2018

Pleasant and sometimes very charming, this book (the third in a series by Foster that started with How To Read Literature Like a Professor) is sure to inspire both the curious general reader and the scholar. Written for the former, it strives to open readers' eyes to the pleasures of the poet's art, and packs enough insight to engage and excite audiences of almost any level. Foster (English emeritus, Univ. of Michigan) has a gift for introducing such daunting topics as meter, form, and enjambment with skill and humor, and does a capable job of taking the pain out of symbolism and imagery by emphasizing the importance of reading the words on the page and trusting your own intuition. What is most admirable in this work is the way Foster sets the reader free to embrace the text, to question the text, and finally to make the text their own. Though the book isn't always successful, it is stuffed with helpful advice, comes with a nice selection of poems and passages from longer works, and could open the doors and windows of poetry wide for readers who have too long avoided some of the world's greatest writers. VERDICT Recommended for high school and public library collections.--Herman Sutter, St. Agnes Acad., Houston

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