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

Epic poems convey narrative in verse form. They stem from the oral tradition of poetry and in some cases feature repetition and elaborate similes so that they will be memorable to the tellers who pass them on through repetition. While the oldest forms of epic poetry in the Western tradition were unauthored, with the name Homer being given retrospectively to the author of the Ancient Greek epics The Odyssey and The Iliad, the form has achieved prominence in the English tradition, especially within the work of the 17th-century British poet John Milton and the 19th-century American Henry Longfellow. While Foster refers to the orality of epic poetry, in this guide he is more interested in the lyric form.

At a glance, free verse seems to be the opposite of closed-form poetry, as it does not heed the latter’s conventions of rhyme, stanza, and meter. However, the form is governed by the poet’s sensibility and the requirements of the subject matter. The free verse tradition was pioneered by the 19th-century American poet Walt Whitman, and Foster maintains that “modern American poetry grows directly (either by affinity or opposition) from Whitman” (52). Whitman was an “American upstart,” who shook the iambic base of English poetry as he found other means of creating rhythm, such as the repetition of words and sounds (51).

While students of poetry are often so intimidated by free verse that they treat it as though it is lineless prose, Foster reminds them that even this style of poetry creates its own formal rules and expectations. It is not, as Robert Frost said, like playing tennis without a net but rather “more like playing tennis with a net you wove yourself” (136).

A lyric is a poem that expresses thought or feeling at the expense of narrative. In Foster’s words, lyrics are “a little musical,” reflective of their roots in ancient times when they were accompanied by a lyre (31). Still, although lyrics do not feature a long and elaborate narrative in the manner of epics, they usually depict a progression in thought or feeling from verse to verse. While a lyric can feel like an intimate exposure of the poet’s innermost thoughts and feelings, Foster reminds us that the speaker of the poem is as imaginative a construct as its contents. We would thus do better to think of the speaker as a narrator than the poet themselves. Other more codified forms of poetry, such as the sonnet, are also part of the lyric tradition.

Meter in English poetry refers to the pattern of stresses in a line. It deals with syllables rather than whole words, meaning that students must pay attention to where the stress falls in a particular grouping of words. The iamb, the most common metrical foot, or pattern, of stresses is “composed of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable” (37). This gives it its characteristic “‘da-DUM’ (as in ‘weak-STRONG’)” flavor (38). While the iamb and iambic pentameter (meaning five iambs in a line) is the most common type of meter in English poetry, poets have experimented with different patterns of syllable stress to create a sense of dynamism and meaning. For example, the iamb’s opposite, the trochee, which features the stress on the first syllable as opposed to the second, as in the word mother, can be used to comic effect, especially at the end of a line.

While Foster provides in-depth analysis of meter at work in poetry, he shows that it is not the only means of creating musicality in a poetic work. Free verse poets, for example, tend to prefer repetition over metrical patterning.

Foster makes clear there are numerous definitions of poetry, with each famous poet coming up with a definition that suits their own work. For example, Shelley, the 19th-century British poet “of ecstatic experience, saying that it is the best and happiest thoughts of the happiest and best minds” (32). Foster argues that this definition fits Shelley’s verse “like a tailored suit” but does not “necessarily prove helpful with poetry in general” (32).

However, having considered the work of multiple poets, Foster reaches the overarching definition of a poem as “an experiment with and in language, an attempt to discover how best to capture its subject matter and make readers see it anew” (33). In addition to originality of perspective, Foster emphasizes how language is central to poetry as it is to no other form of literature, “becoming both the experiment and the laboratory where it takes place” (33). This is in part because poetry uses fewer words than novels and must choose them more carefully, but also because the aesthetic interests of poetry require a special attention to every word.

Rhyme, the feature that many people consider poetry’s trademark feature, consists of the repetition of “the same or similar sounds” (83). While most people are familiar with end rhyme, or the kind that occurs at the end of the line, there is also internal rhyme, which occurs within a line. Rhyme is employed variously in different types of poems. While a rhyming couplet comprises a pair of rhymes that appear in successive lines, a more elaborate rhyme scheme delays the appearance of the rhyming word within a stanza.

While rhyme provides a satisfying sense of rhythm and musicality within poetry, Foster stresses that many notable poems have been written in its opposite, blank verse, which obeys the other rules of closed-form poetry but does not rhyme.

A stanza refers to a group of lines within a poem that are presented as a unit. In closed-form poetry the stanza may be governed by rules concerning meter and end rhyme. However, free verse poems like Marianne Moore’s “The Fish” employ stanzas according to their own internal logic. There is normally a development of thought, feeling, or theme in the movement from one stanza to another.