How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse

Many readers are intimidated by poetry because they do not understand how to read it. For example, many disregard the poem’s punctuation and put too much emphasis at the end of a line. Not all poetic sentences stop at the end of the line. Many poets enjamb their sentences, which means the sentence carries on beyond the poetic line. Foster insists that readers look out for the sentences to fully grasp the meaning. He emphasizes the importance of reading the poem aloud because, to cite the poet Robert Pinsky, “poetry is a ‘vocal, which is to say a bodily, art’” (13). However, the most important rule may be to reread the poem because this allows the reader to let go of meaning and focus on the more enjoyable, sensory aspects of the experience.

Foster borrows his chapter title, “The Sounds of Sense” from the American poet Robert Frost, who argues that he can discern the meaning of the poem from the way it sounds, which is “a combination of rhythm and other aural elements” (14).

Foster then guides the reader to appreciate the sound quality of famous poems by Emily Dickinson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He also introduces the reader to the concept of scansion, where the pattern of stressed (or accented) syllables and unstressed are mapped out in the poem. This patterning of syllables is a staple of the iambic pentameter that is the chief metrical force of English verse. Iambic pentameter, which can be defined as 10 syllables of five metrical feet. Each foot consists of an unstressed and then a stressed syllable.

To get a sense of how sounds function beyond the meaning attached to the words in the text, we need to think of the sound of poetry as separate from the meaning, much the way we think of the melody as separate from the lyrics in music. In Foster’s words, “we have to push past words to their constituent sounds” (21).

Foster then guides the reader through common poetic devices: alliteration—the repetition of words with the same first letter; consonance—the repetition of consonants; and assonance—the repetition of vowels. The well-known poetic feature of rhyme deals with similar sounds at the end of the line.

Foster considers the tension of poetry is that “meaning lies in words, melody in sounds,” and the poet’s challenge is to bring them together (24). Foster shows how avant-garde poets, such as American E. E. Cummings and British Gerald Manley Hopkins, play with our expectations of sound and meaning, for example by using rhythm and onomatopoeia (the use of words that sound like their meaning, such as crackle). They thus create an experiential conception of their theme in addition to an intellectual one.

Although some types of poems, such as sonnets with their prescriptive rhyme scheme and 14 lines, are easy to spot, it is difficult to define what a poem itself is. Foster quotes some masterful historic poets’ definitions, finding that each provides a definition of the poet’s own approach to the genre rather than something that can be taken as a universal.

For his part, Foster finds that poets aspire to give pleasure, whether aesthetic, emotional or intellectual. Moreover, they seek to astonish or communicate a universal truth in a new way. He finds the closest definition of poetry is

an experiment with and in language, an attempt to discover how best to capture its subject and make readers see it anew. In so doing, the poem makes its exploration of language part of the subject, becoming both the experiment and the laboratory where it takes place (33).

Overall, to Foster’s mind, poetry is a struggle against being mediocre or “average” (34).