How to Read a Poem

The book's new as far as I can tell; I think its condition had been described as "good." But what I really like about this vendor is how they ship the book in an envelope that conforms to its exact dimensions. Amazon itself doesn't do that. I received a hardcover book from Amazon this week that had been thrown in a box loose with other things I had ordered. It had a rough journey. Which I wouldn't care too much about normally but this book happened to be a gift I had ordered for my granddaughter.

Eagleton writes well, no one denies that. And he's got some trenchant observations and good analytical skills. But his books do seem to pump out very familiar themes to an Eagleton reader, such as Marxist literary criticism and the Russian Formalists, with very little variations on those themes. And he seems to over-elaborate many sentences and many arguments, fiddling around with a single idea but expressing it in twenty different ways, one after another, swooning with uncertain effects at times. The book is at its most superfluous in the chapter on Russian formalists (chapter 3), which could be amputated painlessly. One could also lop off chapter 1 with little inconvenience, and weed off from Chapter 4 anything other than Eagleton's close readings. What would be left after doing all that is a superb work of applied literary criticism. And some readings ARE superb. He applies finely-tuned reading techniques to a number of poets, and the result is a thrilling encounter with multiple meanings, provocative interpretations, an array of techniques and effects working deftly together. In short, what studying literature is all about. Just for that, How to Read a Poem is worth it. And for brilliant phrases like this one: "In everyday life, talking about imaginary people as though they were real is known as psychosis; in universities, it is known as literary criticism" (p. 22).

Better than described, book was like brand new, fast shipper too!

I got this as a textbook for my undergraduate Poetry workshop. While it has plenty of information about poetry inside, Eagleton is incredibly hard to comprehend, especially for beginnings. As always, he is long-winded and makes things way more complicated then he needs to. If you have to get this book for school, be prepared to spend some extra time deciphered Eagleton's writings, especially if you are new to poetry.

Language was exquisite

No editor for this book = big mistake. Examples intended to bolster academic information were often limited in scope and off the point. Some were clearly too personal for an academic book, disparaging to American poetry, and ignorant of obvious feminine points of view.

This is one of the worst books I've ever read. I am an English teacher with a Masters in English and Education, and I love poetry! However, this book makes me hate poetry. The author is a pompous narcissist that makes bold claims (using words and phrases like ALL the time and ALWAYS for his own opinion and ideas), and it offers no citations or references from where he draws his ideas. The book references lines from poetry, but doesn't have the poems in the book for the reader to make the connections he is making. It is confusing, repetitive, and boring. Do NOT read this book unless you are required to, and even then, I hope you survive the book without hating poetry altogether.

Terry Eagleton believes that literary criticism - scrupulously close reading and sensitivity to questions of form - is a dying art and has written this book to revive it. The book can be broadly divided into an examination of the theory of the Russian Formalists, an exploration of the relationship between form and content and a practical explanation of the tools the poet uses in his art.Eagleton's explanation of the Russian Formalists is a model of clarity. In eleven pages he manages to explain the the theory and practice of the school in a way that is interesting and comprehensible to the lay reader while respecting the complexity of the theory. He explains how information flows from deviation from the regular, how words in poems form parts of multiple systems, and how the interaction of those systems, in highlighting similarities and differences, draws the maximum meaning from the words used.Eagleton then examines content (what a poem says) and form (how it says it). He demonstrates how the elegant form of Grey's 'Elegy in a Church Courtyard' works against its content - the dire situation portrayed, and how the sheer excellence of the form in Yeats' 'Coole Park and Ballylee' transcends the content, the lament for the loss of a society that can produce such excellence. He demonstrates how the form of Derek Mahon's 'Disused Shed in County Wexford' dominates the content, how the poet successfully invokes through form the horror and tragedy of the holocaust while his content uses the merely everyday, an abandoned shed in rural Ireland and mushrooms.Eagleton then explores the tools of the poet, the sources of a poem's meaning. He outlines how the meaning of a poem is found in its tone, mood and pitch. For example there is no mistaking the tone and pitch intended by George Herbert in his line "I struck the board and cried, 'No more;/ I will abroad!' nor the near whisper suitable for Tennyson's lines 'Be near me when the light is low,/ when the blood creeps, and the nerves prick.' Eagleton finds a more subtle source of poetic meaning in a poem's texture; how a poem weaves its various sounds into palpable patterns, citing Tennyson's 'Lotus Eaters' and its avoidance of sharp consonants in favour of a softer, more sibilant sounds to re-enact the somnolent state of the lotus eaters. He outlines how poets use punctuation to convey meaning, such as the seven line long sentence Yeats uses in 'Coole Park and Ballylee' following immediately by a short one line sentence 'to show that the poet has some breath left in him even after this virtuous display.' He outlines the deep meanings and ambivalence that can be conveyed by grammar, citing the alternative meanings of T.S. Eliot's 'Whispers of Immortality' depending on whether 'leaned' is the past tense of lean or the past participle. He explores how poets use rhyme, explaining how para-rhymes in Wilfrid Owen's 'Insensibility' convey how everything is awry, off-key, out of kilter in the war which the poem describes. Discussing rhythm he points out how the line 'It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way' in Smith's 'Not Waving but Drowning' breaks the established rhythm to give a sense of flurried, disorganised chatter.All this is conveyed with an evidently deep, though lightly carried, learning and with Eagleton's characteristic wicked sense of humour: "this insensitivity to the texture and rhythm of our speech is essential to our practical lives. There is no point in shouting 'Fire!' in a cinema if the audience are simply going to linger over the delectable contrast between the violently stabbing F and the swooning, long drawn-out vowel.", "They may be having a profound experience for some other reason (perhaps they are...thrusting red-hot needles into an effigy of Donald Trump)."

A quick Amazon search for `how to read a poem' shows there's a good few books running with this title. My guess is each of them, in their own way, are tapping into the insecurity a poetry-noob inevitably feels when they open an invitingly slender volume only to discover a dismayingly incomprehensible rabble of words and phrases with seemingly little internal cohesion or general meaning.Terry Eagleton has written a book aimed at the intelligent beginner. If you are someone who is aware of poetry but doesn't always get it, someone who wants to talk intelligently about the subject without having to get your hands dirty and actually write the stuff, and if you're as familiar with Marx as you are with Milton, then this is the cerebral introduction you might be looking for.Eagleton gives some quick definitions of poetry and criticism on his terms, a swift hello to a little bit of theory, and then tries to show why being able to distinguish between the content, or meaning, of poetry and its form, or method, is an important part of understanding a poem in its own terms. He encourages you to allow each poem to stand for itself, separate from any external need for clarity of meaning, identifying such utilitarian concerns more with sales receipts and instruction manuals.There's plenty of examples from different poets littered through the book, from Shakespeare to Stevie Smith, Christina Rossetti, Hilda Doolittle, etc, and what Eagleton does really well for me is to develop a believable and interesting narrative about each poem he uses. Even a poem as superficially simple as William Carlos Williams' 'This is Just to Say', has a distinct purpose behind it. For Eagleton, the form of a poem (all the many reasons that it sounds the way it reads, rather than just saying what it means) is closely linked to its cultural context, which makes for some interesting explanations of why Pope is so Pope-ish, or Eliot so Eliot-like.Ultimately though, this is a book about poetry in a general sense. About how we relate to it as readers and writers, and not about how to grind a poem down and spectroscopically identify its constituent parts. If you want a book that tells you how to distinguish your spondees from your trochees then maybe An Introduction to English Poetry (Fenton) is your buy. That one has whole chapters on trochees and spondees, which you won't find here.

The book arrived in good time and in the condition advertised - good used condition. I am pleased with this purchase.

I nice place to start if you are new to poetry and want to learn the basics.

Very useful for my college course. Delivery timely.

Great