How To Read Poetry

A guide

Photo by Brooks Leibee on Unsplash

In my continuing effort to encourage us all to relearn how to be human and as a companion to my previous article on “How To Read a Novel,” this article will explore the basics of how to read poetry. If you’re anything like me, poetry is much more daunting than fiction. There tends to be a straightforwardness to fiction that makes it accessible and enjoyable even when you don’t understand the underlying “significance.” You may not understand what the imagery is all about or why the author uses certain colors, but you can usually follow the plot. Poetry, on the other hand, is another matter. For most of us, poetry feels like this ambiguous, elite, mysterious artform. In my own studies as an English major, I enjoyed only a handful of poems as an undergraduate, because I understood only a handful. In fact, I was once brought into a professor’s office because I misspelled “poems” as “peoms” throughout an entire paper. There was no spellcheck at the time. Maybe that says more about my spelling than my ignorance of poetry. I’ll let you decide.

Even in graduate school, it took me years and many inspiring professors to learn to enjoy poetry as I enjoyed fiction instead of being afraid of it. Unlike (most) fiction, reading poetry has never come easy for me. I’ve had to fight to appreciate it. But it’s worth the fight. What I’ve discovered is that most truly beautiful, lovely, meaningful artforms require work to appreciate. This is a truism about life. Really nice things require you to invest time and sacrifice, to learn to love them. So how can you learn to love poetry? As with fiction, you begin by approaching with a spirit of humility and a willingness to learn. And you attend carefully to words.