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Overview
Studying Poetry is a fun, concise and helpful guide to understanding poetry which is divided into three parts, form and meaning, critical approaches and interpreting poetry, all of which help to illuminate the beauty and validity of poetry using a wide variety of examples, from Dylan Thomas to Bob Dylan. Key Features:
- An accessible and thought-provoking introduction to poetry which takes students through the essentials to enhance both their understanding and their appreciation.
- Contains a wonderfully diverse collection of poems, from Bob Dylan to Dylan Thomas, which truly engage the reader.
- The authors' style mixes humor with erudition and allows students to easily absorb the information they need without repetitive re-reading.
- New to this edition is a chapter on the importance of poetry which examines the many ways in which poetry is expressed in youth culture today.
- This second edition has also seen updates throughout and the introduction of some more contemporary poems to align with course curriculum.
Synopsis
This accessible and compact guide helps readers to understand and appreciate poetry as a genre, to develop an informed and articulate response to individual poems, and to become aware of the larger concerns involved in reading poetry. The first part of the book, "Form and Meaning," deals with the formal characteristics of poetry, such as metaphor, symbol, image, meter, rhythm, and rhyme. The second section, "Critical Approaches," explores the relationship between reading poetry and key concepts in critical theory, focusing on the poem as an object, the idea of the author, and the role of the reader. In part three, "Interpreting Poetry," the discussion explores such issues as political poetry, the poem in history, and the limits of poetry. Studying Poetry refers to a wide range of poetry and poets and offers stimulating readings of individual poems.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"Its great virtue lies in the amount of questions it raises. [The authors’] enthusiasm, engagement and occasional knowingly facetious asides should appeal to, and enlighten, bright [students]. They will also find the glossary of technical and theoretical terms very useful."—The Times Educational Supplement