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

Foster finds that discussions of poetic form along with the technical terms used to describe different types of poems intimidate students. He then goes on to explore different types of poetic forms, beginning with the haiku—the short, Japanese 5-7-5 syllable form that is a staple of middle-grade education. While the shortness of the haiku makes it seem deceptively simple, the bigger challenge is the compression of meaning. This is what caused the haiku to find favor with the 1910s and 20s generation of American Imagist poets, who wanted to write evocative poems with a singular focus.

While poetic forms imported from the traditions of romance languages, such as the sestina with its strict rules about stanza length and rhyme scheme, were the province of courtly Renaissance poets, other forms like the limerick with its distinctive AABBA rhyme scheme are the staples of bawdy comic verse. Foster shows how demanding, rigid forms like the villanelle, a 19-liner that features two constantly repeating lines, have payoffs when poets learn how to master the form. Foster views that given “the repetition of both refrain lines at the end, no form feels more satisfyingly finished than the villanelle. It more or less says, ‘There! Wasn’t that grand?’” (115).

Foster shows how even the most obscure, esoteric forms of poetry can be updated for new generations. For example, the rondeau a three-part poem and an import from medieval French verse, enabled World War I poet John McCrae to write his famous elegy lamenting the mass death of young soldiers. As Foster explains, “the rondeau is especially well suited to terse, three-part movements […] it permits, even requires, the quick transitions from point to point so that the meaning is not lost” (118).

While some poetic forms dictate structure, others like the elegy (a commemorative poem) and the pastoral (a poem on rural subjects) dictate theme. The ode, a classical form, is characterized by both, as it has a specific three-part structure, introducing, challenging, and resolving a theme.

Foster acknowledges that the forms he has mentioned are merely the tip of the iceberg and that within the prescriptions of particular forms lies extensive opportunity for expression.

As the sight of endless unbroken verse is demoralizing for the reader, poetry is often broken into smaller units such as stanzas or verses. Stanzas can be of varying length, with the shortest being the rhyming couplet and the most common being the four-line quatrain “since it is nearly perfect length for conveying a single thought” (127). Longer stanza lengths have been used but mainly by skilled poets of past eras or for contrived or comic purposes. Some stanza forms such as the nine-line iambic pentameter stanza developed by Edmund Spenser for the epic The Faerie Queene are named after the poets who made them famous.

In more modern, free-verse poems, such as Marianne Moore’s The Fish, the stanzas are not conventionally shaped but are still recognizable for their “repetition within a poem” (129). On closer inspection, Moore’s stanzas are five-lines long and feature a rhyme scheme, meaning they are more regular than they initially seem. Moore thus does not completely depart from convention as play with it.

During the 20th century the concept of free verse was born in opposition to the closed-form poetry of previous centuries. Still, free verse poets often had definite ideas about how poetry should appear and sound. For example, around 1912 Ezra Pound and his Imagist co-conspirators came up with a treatise for free verse that demanded poetry should be more dictated by the musical phrase than the metronome and that the subject itself should inform the form.

In the term free verse, Foster argues that “verse” is at least as important as “free” as the text still needs to be recognizable as poetry (135). Instead, “the difference between this modern innovation and traditional poetry is that the rules come from inside” the poem rather than being imposed by external conventions (135). In reading such poems we must pay attention to the decisions the writer is making to shape the poem.

Foster believes it is difficult to write good poetry regardless of whether it is closed-form or free verse. When we encounter a bad poem of either genre, we must not become prejudiced against that type.

The figurative language, whereby imagery is used to convey more than its literal meaning, employed in poetry is a trait that intimidates many readers who worry that they may not understand its true meaning.

Foster assures the reader that the images in poetry function on a literal level in addition to a metaphorical one. Thus, a tulip is a tulip as well as the potential harbinger of a secondary meaning. Similes, which compare one thing to another using the word “like,” are the most obvious use of figurative language, whereas metaphors are more subtle, lacking “the overt declaration that a comparison is taking place, which is what the ‘like’ or ‘as’ represents” (140). While similes and metaphors can be tethered to singular fleeting images, they often have whole poems built around them, forming a conceit. This is the case with the British 19th-century poet Lord Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty” (1813), which compares the charms of a beautiful woman to those of a lovely night. The progression of the three stanzas indicates a development of Byron’s thoughts on this extended metaphor. While the subject of Byron’s comparison is obvious from the outset, in Robert Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night” (1928) the metaphor of the nightwalker encountering spiritual darkness in addition to physical comes upon the reader more subtly.

The symbols in poetry can become confusing when they allude to not singular but potentially infinite ideas beyond themselves. As Foster writes, the poetic symbol “points beyond its specific identity towards some more universal condition and hints at a small constellation of possible meanings” (146). This means that the interpretations can be as individual as readers themselves. To Foster’s mind, such diversity should be celebrated.

Foster emphasizes that poetry should be read aloud, as it was originally an oral form. This is especially the case with the medieval poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, a seminal work which though written down hailed from a poet versed in the oral tradition. Foster gives detailed instructions that to read Chaucer properly, it must be done aloud “as if it’s German, but with a slightly French accent” (148). Doing so will enable you to hear the music in the lines, in the manner of rappers, who exploited the tetrameter and strong stresses in the work.

The Beat poets also emphasized orality, aiming for a breathless quality when they read their work aloud. For example, Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl” was an experiment with the long line, so it gives an indication that it should be read in an uncontrolled manner, moving from one line inexorably toward another. They saw “poetic lines as ‘breath units,’ which is to say the number of words that could be uttered on a single intake of breath” (150). The Beat poets each used their unique physicality and quality of voice to determine line length and ultimately the sound of their poems.

The legacy of the Beats is the late 20th- and early 21st-century poetry slam, where emphasis is on rhythm and catchiness rather than elite poetics. Foster emphasizes that slam poetry does not detract from formal written poetry and that the former may even attract audiences to the latter.

Foster closes his chapter by emphasizing that the cradle of Western poetry was the oral epic and how fifth century BC Greek classics, such Homer’s The Iliad or The Odyssey, were originally sung. The sung nature of the original infiltrates the written version with its numerous repetitions and evocative similes to describe returning characters.

The song is the poem’s close relation, just as the songwriter is a species of poet. This is because “songs generally follow the patterns of poetry in their language,” employing iambs and trochees as music reinforces regular metrical patterns (157). Moreover, terms that refer to the structure of songs, such as choruses and verses, are also staples of poetry.

However, songs differ from poems for featuring words that are shorter and easier to pronounce and conform to their “sound-shape,” meaning that “stressed syllables have to be available to fall on the beat” (165). It also helps if song lyrics have a concise catchy concept, and poems like Robert Burns’s “A Red, Red Rose” have been turned into song. Songwriting is often a more collaborative endeavor, featuring the contribution of lyricists as well as writers.