How to Read a Poem

An introductory text that is both an anthology of over 200 poems and a comprehensive exploration of the form. Over 100 poets featured; those most widely represented include Blake, Byron, cummings, Dickinson, Donne, Alan Dugan, Frost, Louise Gluck, George Herbert, Keats, Pope, Pound, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Yeats.

Burton Raffel has taught English, Classics, and Comparative Literature at universities in the United States, Israel, and Canada. His books include translations of Beowulf, Horace: Odes, Epodes, Epistles, Satires, The Complete Poetry and Prose of Chairil Anwar, From the Vietnamese, Ten Centuries of Poetry, The Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich, Mandelstram (with Alla Burago), and Poems From the Old English and The Annotated Milton; several critical studies, Introduction to Poetry, How to Read a Poem, The Development of Modern Indonesian Poetry, and The Forked Tounge: A Study of the Translation Process; and Mia Poems, a volume of his own poetry. Mr. Raffel practiced law on Wall Street and taught in the Ford Foundation’s English Language Teacher Training Project in Indonesia.

What Poetry Means

1

(50)

Poems Supplementary to Chapter 1

35

(15)

Metaphor

50

(40)

Poems Supplementary to Chapter 2

74

(16)

How Poetry Works: Approaches and Techniques

90

(46)

Poetic Music

91

(12)

Contrast; Balance

103

(10)

Precision

113

(4)

Obscurity

117

(19)

Poems Supplementary to Chapter 3

125

(11)

What Poetry Uses: Devices

136

(41)

Rhyme

136

(11)

Alliteration

147

(5)

Repetition: Refrain

152

(9)

Allusion; Acrostics

161

(8)

Imitation; Parody

169

(5)

Ononmatopoeia

174

(3)

Shapes and Structures

177

(56)

Couplets; Quatrains

178

(9)

Ballads and Hymns

187

(6)

Sonnets (Italian, Shakespearean, Spenserian)

193

(7)

Songs (Lyrics)

200

(5)

Dialogues; Monologues

205

(9)

Other Traditional Forms

214

(12)

Free Forms

226

(5)

Concrete Poetry

231

(2)

Metrics

233

(15)

Author Index

248

(3)

Poem Index

251

(7)

Subject Index

258

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Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials