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

Robert Frost was a Pulitzer prize winning American poet and the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1958-1959. He was famed for his understated yet precise observations of nature. He used such natural images in extended metaphors about the human condition. Although at first glance the poems with their unadorned diction seem deceptively simple, their ability to suggest multiple interpretations means they have become staples of poetry seminars at all levels of education. Indeed, this is why Frost makes so many appearances in Foster’s guide, alerting the reader that there is always more to this poet’s work than their English teacher has taught them.

Frost eschewed the free verse tradition that was trendy during his time, likening it to “playing tennis ‘with the net down’,” thereby implying it was senseless and devoid of meaning (136). Instead, Frost became a master of metrical form. He experimented with different types of closed-form poetry, including the sonnet, and “his strongest allegiance probably was to the quatrain with simple rhymes such as abab and abcb, and within its restrictions he was able to achieve an infinite variety” (Gerber, Philip. “Robert Frost.” Encyclopedia Britannica Online, 22 Mar. 2022).

Langston Hughes was an African American poet who was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance celebration of Black art and culture in the 1920s and 30s. Hughes experimented with different types of writing, including poetry, plays, and newspaper columns. Blues music, the exclamatory declarations of the Black gospel church, and African American dialect infiltrated his verse, giving it a unique rhythm and tone. For Foster, “when Hughes employs Black English, he does so to establish an authentic voice for some black experience and to find the musicality of that voice” (54). While some critics, including those in the Black community, accused Hughes of caricaturing Black speech cadences and pandering to derogatory minstrel-type stereotypes, Black writers of future generations, such as Toni Morrison, would use Hughes as a role model in further exploring “the musicality of the speech of their people” (54).

Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning poet Marianne Moore was a free verse poet who experimented with line length and stanza formation in an attempt to convey the world anew. Foster emphasizes how this poet, who spoke of her art as planting “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” sought to surprise and delight (32). Moore had an eclectic formation, graduating from Bryn Mawr College as a biology major and being a teacher of commercial subjects. Her fish-shaped poem “The Fish” (1921) features multiple times in Foster’s work and illustrates his point that one needs to reread poetry to grasp its full meaning. For example, while at first glance the poem with its irregular line lengths, which sometimes consist of merely a single word, appears as the freest of free verse, on closer inspection one can see that Moore employs a form of stanza. However, instead of using a readymade model handed down to her by the closed-form poetry tradition, Moore makes a shape and rhyme scheme that suits her subject matter. Foster argues that Moore’s playfulness invites the reader to be equally imaginative in their interpretation of her work and to bring all of themselves to it.

Geoffrey Chaucer was the author of The Canterbury Tales (1400) in addition to other poetic works. He is a watershed figure for English-language poetry, as he exemplified the shift from oral, ambiguously authored forms of verse to written works by a single author. He wrote in Middle English, the vernacular language spoken in England between c. 1150-1470 and an earlier version of the language we know today.

Foster credits Chaucer with the “iambic foundation” that defines closed-form English poetry (51). However, for his part, Chaucer was influenced by trends from abroad, such as the stanza formation of Dante Alighieri, the Italian author of The Divine Comedy (1320). Interestingly, Foster finds Chaucer’s heritage of oral tradition has come full circle, as The Canterbury Tales has been taken on by rappers.