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

Rhythm is a more obvious and important component than meter to the sound of poetry. While meter can sometimes set the course of rhythm, other devices, such as repetition and alliteration also work to convey the beat that is customary to poetry. American poets in the free verse tradition of Walt Whitman are more concerned with rhythm than meter, whereas British poets tend to remain loyal to the tradition of metrical patterning. For Foster, while British English verse in the 20th century remained terse and controlled, American poetry “has been rumbling and shaking” since Whitman’s day (52).

Other pioneers in American poetry’s rhythm included the Black poet Langston Hughes, who used repetition not only of words but repeated prepositional phrases to create an expectation of return and rhythm for the reader. He also uses African American diction to musical effect and explored the rhythmic possibilities inherent within jazz and blues traditions.

E. E. Cummings took the other American poets’ experiments with rhythm further when he smashed words together to create portmanteaus such as “onetwothreefourfive pigeeonsjustlikethat” and played with the arrangement of words on the page (56). This creates its own type of eye rhythm as the unusual spatial position creates a baroque sense of timing.

Foster compares the strong stresses, short lines, and alliteration of the Old English epic Beowulf to the work of modern Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney to show how modern poets have repurposed old forms for subject matter such as the Northern Irish Troubles of the late 20th century.

Overall, Foster states “the main point about rhythm” is “getting what one imagines onto the page into the listener’s ear” (60), and the paths toward this kind of success are as numerous as the number of different poets.

In this chapter Foster turns to an aspect of poetry that often confuses readers—its lines. In the best poetry, the relationship of lines to sentences serves the overall meaning of the poem. Lines can be end-stopped, which means they terminate with punctuation and thus give the poem a choppy rhythm, or they can be enjambed, thus allowing the reader to ignore them and flow freely through the verse.

Free verse, defined as the type of poetry that pays little attention to metrical conventions. is more liberal and experimental in its use of the line. In the 1910s a tradition called Imagism broke the line further apart so that phrases such as those appearing in William Carlos Williams’ The Red Wheelbarrow (1923) “glazed with rain / water” were cut apart from convention with “rain” and “water” appearing on different lines (66). While Foster argues that there is no semantic or metrical reason for rain and water to be on separate lines, “this more vertical arrangement causes the poem to last just a little longer,” which engenders drama and suspense by playing against the reader’s expectations (66). Other Imagist poems, such as Marianne Moore’s The Fish (1921), depart further from convention in varying the number of syllables and having line placement that visually imitates the coral reef form of its subject matter. While the usage of line is only limited by our imaginations, it plays the critical function of distinguishing poetry from prose.

Given their small size compared to novels and their aesthetic purposes, lyric poems are preoccupied with the matter of word choice. The difficulty for poets who would wish to create something new arises from the fact that they have the same words at their disposal as everyone else and must use “language that has been debased and devalued by many kinds of abuse” (72).

The technical term for word choice is diction, which also incorporates phrasing and use of similes and metaphors. By varying the diction, a poet can make their work sound more or less formal. The English we know today is composed of the terse, short Germanic words of the medieval Anglo-Saxon peasantry, the more elegant-sounding French words brought in by the Norman invader William the Conqueror in 1066, and legalistic-sounding Latin words. English-language poets can consistently use one strand of their linguistic ancestry or combine them for a more playful effect. Importantly, for poets, word choice is not only related to meaning but also to the look of the word on the page and its sound when spoken aloud.

In the study of poetry, we may undertake a process of reverse engineering to figure out why a writer has chosen particular words. While language evolves over time, we think of it as mostly stable until presented with the work of an avant-garde poet like E. E. Cummings, who performs such linguistic feats as using verbs as nouns and nouns as verbs. Foster proposes that “if we listen for the sense imparted by the words rather than insisting on a traditional model, we see a host of possibilities for the line’s meaning” (78). This requires a more flexible approach from the reader than a slavish quest for meaning.

Another crucial matter in diction is the use of dialect that takes the poem away from standard English and substitutes common words for regional ones. It is a fraught topic, as scholars debate whether it is more accurate depiction or caricature. However, the diction of a regional dialect often conveys an attractive and immersive sense of rhythm, and nonregional listeners can gauge unknown words from the context.

End-rhyme, or the placing together of similar sounding words at the end of the line, is a feature many people associate with poetry. This gives it a musical, songlike quality. However, rhymes can also happen in the middle of the line (internal rhyme), as in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” which goes “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary” (83). The internal rhyme strikes a feverish note proper to Poe’s subject matter. Then, feminine rhyme constitutes the rhyming of two or more syllables, and slant rhyme is when two words have very similar sounds but aren’t perfect rhymes, such as the rhyming of trouble with rumble rather than bubble.

Long epic poems often use rhyme schemes to establish a sense of continuity. A popular one that has been used in English epics is the terza rima, first used by Dante in The Divine Comedy, which has a rhyme scheme of ABA-BCB-CDC-DED, and so on. Staples of courtly Renaissance literature, the Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets, also employ a definitive scheme, which tests the poet’s skills.

Foster contrasts rhyming poetry with blank verse—the type of unrhyming poetry that follows the conventions of rhyming works in having regular meter, line length, and stanza arrangements. The inception of blank verse in English poetry began with Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. The nonrhyming quality followed the convention of the Latin. Other great epics, such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), have also employed blank verse. Often less obviously musical, blank verse strikes a more pensive note. While it is known as the bedrock of Shakespeare’s plays, it has also been used in more modern poems, such as those of Adrienne Rich.

One of the biggest crimes poetry instructors commit against their students is to mislead them into thinking that the narrator of a poem is automatically the author. To Foster’s mind, we should give up seeking the intention of the author, who will always be elusive, and instead focus on the speaker in the poem before us.

While it is easy to differentiate speakers from authors in dramatic monologues such as 19th-century British poet Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” it becomes trickier to do so in lyric poems such as Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” Here, the immediacy and universal condition of deciding on one path over another, makes many readers mistake the narrator for Frost. However, the truth is that Frost was inspired to write the poem owing to the indecision of another poet, his friend Edward Thomas, who could never make up his mind between competing alternatives. Foster argues that “we do well to remember that there is always some daylight between the speaker of a poem and this ghostly stand-in, the implied author” (97).

Even confessional poets, such as the mid-20th century American Sylvia Plath, who appear to directly address issues in their lives rather than adopt a philosophical stance, there is fictionalizing involved and a “gap between what a poet knows or thinks and what he or she allows the poem to say” (99). While the poet’s voice is powerful, the poem’s voice is infinitely greater.