How to Read a Poem Book

How to Read a Poem is an incredible book in a lot of ways. Raffel manages to touch on every aspect of poetry from the very abstract (meaning, metaphor, musicality) to the very mechanical (structure and meter). He does this with a wide variety of over 200 example poems and brief explanations which do not overstay their welcome.

In fact, if anything, I craved more of Raffel's explanations. Particularly in the chapter on metaphor. Hey, I thought I was a pretty astute reader, but the meaning of many poems I encounter are, unfortunately, still quite opaque to me. His comments for these are more like guideposts: very helpful in pointing the way to understanding without even remotely spoon-feeding the answers.

As a beginner, I found this to be a very dense and rich book. It required careful reading. I read this in small doses over a period of two and a half months. It has been in every room of the house and in the back yard. It has ridden in the car. It has been in stores.

Despite its density, How to Read a Poem did not ever feel like an academic text to me. In fact, I became truly enamored with it when I came upon this passage in the commentary about Philip Levine's poem, "A Late Answer" in Chapter 3:

"I think there may be some comfort for the beginning reader of poetry in the confession, which I freely make, that I neither understand nor like the lines about the sea saving "it's tears / for the rising tide." ...why the sea weeps here I cannot fathom."

That was an awesome and very welcome admission. And there's more like it shortly after in the sub-chapter on "Obscurity" wherein I finally, truly came to understand and accept that much of my problem with older poetry has nothing to do with my (lack of) innate intelligence, but with the fact that I don't share a classical Greek and Latin education with the great writers of yore. "Obscurity" is completely wonderful and I wish I could simply quote it here in its entirety. I'll simply give you this taste (from his commentary on a poem by Philip Lamantia): "I have no idea what this is all about...I believe in poetry as communication, but not in poetry as befuddlement." (!)

Again, his wonderful frankness appears in Chapter 4's sub-chapter "Allusion; Acrostics" when describing the difficulty of understanding the allusions used in a Hilda Doolittle poem wherein he calls them "basically indecipherable" and "I have tried to track the allusion down; I cannot. Is it real? legendary? imaginary? I do not know" and a line is "more or less baffling" and finally and importantly, he concludes "...without understanding so many of the important words, how can one hope to understand the poem? (I do not myself understand even the title...)."

The Allusion sub-sub-chapter ends with "Over-allusiveness is not, to be sure, the mark of all modern poetry; it is definitely the mark of some modern poetry. ...It becomes, in the end, a matter of taste." I think that's a very nice way to put it.

Oh, and I can't help sharing this hilarious Raffel summation of acrostics: "But if neither John Keats nor Alexander Pope can do better than this, why need we linger over the acrostic form?"

In general, I think the ordering of content in this book is excellent. Starting with the least technical aspects of poetry like metaphor is a great way to get people in the door. By the time we get to form and metrics, I think we're ready for the details.

Other oft-neglected features that are real stand-outs in How to Read a Poem are the Table of Contents that actually includes the sub-chapters and no less than three indexes (Authors, Poems, and Subject)! These all combine to make this not only a great primer and introduction, but also an excellent reference!

Tags: down-to-earth, scholarship, excellent presentation, poems galore, lucidity, bafflement, hilltop, outcrop, cowbell, buttercup, whetstone, thunderstorm, pitchfork, steeplebush