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

“One of the problems with poetry is that people don’t talk about it. Or not enough. In part, we don’t know what to say. Maybe it’s just intimidation.”

Foster introduces the chief problem his manual grapples with, which is that poetry is intimidating for most readers, who have no clue about how to respond to it. The notion that people who are typically full of opinions have no idea how to talk about poetry is a symptom of how this elite literary genre has become cut off from the masses.

“Poetry uses language to take us to a place beyond language.”

Foster introduces the idea that poetry uses its composite words to suggest concepts beyond the immediate meaning of the language. While all language is metaphorical in that it is comprised of signifiers that convey a meaning beyond the word, poetry with its employment of symbolism uses language to help us travel even further from the mundane realm. Foster uses this quote to appeal to the reader’s sense of wonder.

“I want you to keep in mind something most people intuit even if they can’t articulate it: Reading poetry requires more than just your brain. Writing poetry is a full-contact activity; so, too, must we bring our entire being to bear on the act of reading it. That is certainly a part of the intimidation that we may feel when we launch into a book of poems, the sense that demands being made on us are of a different order than those made by our other reading.”

In arguing for an embodied as opposed to cerebral experience of poetry, Foster indicates the immersive, holistically transformative capacity of the genre and its capacity to impact us emotionally as well as intellectually. Thus, the reader will be going on a bigger journey than they may initially think. In stating that readers already have an instinct for the embodied nature of poetry, Foster gives them confidence that their instincts about this genre are right and that they ought to lean into them.