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

Foster refers to “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” (1979), Craig Raine’s poem about an alien coming to earth to illustrate the poet’s perennial goal of ‘“making strange,’ taking commonplace elements of our experience and making them alien to us, as if we never saw them before” (172). Foster elaborates that “defamiliarization splits in two main ways: seeing things differently and saying things differently” (173). While Raine and the visionary 19th-century British poet William Blake’s genius lies in seeing differently, other poets want to deliver universal truths in a completely new way. For example, the 1910s Imagist poets supplanted centuries of elaborate description with the presentation of stark, simple images. T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land used Imagist techniques over 434 lines. Here, the seemingly disconnected images reflect the culture’s sense of loss and incomprehension following the unparalleled destruction of the First World War. Rather than telling readers what to think, Eliot allows them to fill in the gaps with their own meaning.

Foster concludes his book with an exploration of the reasons poetry, and nonnarrative lyric poetry in particular, continues to be so powerful. He argues that the impulse toward self-expression is universal and has been a feature of humanity since the beginning.