"Hirsch'due south contribution is significant, [grounded] in the obvious pleasure he has experienced through words. . . . Who could resist the wiles of this poetry-broker-a author rapidly becoming the babe boomers' preeminent homo of letters?" —Detroit Free Press

Pages:368 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (1999)
Linguistic communication:English
ISBN-xiii:978-0156005661

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How to Read a Poem is an unprecedented exploration of poetry and feeling. In language at once acute and emotional, distinguished poet and critic Edward Hirsch describes why poetry matters and how we can open upward our imaginations so that its bulletin can make a deviation. In a marvelous reading of poetry from around the world, including work by Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and Sylvia Plath, amongst many others, Hirsch discovers the truthful meaning of their words and ideas and brings their sublime bulletin domicile into our hearts. A masterful work by a master poet, this brilliant summation of poetry and homo nature will speak to all readers who long to place poetry in their lives.

HOW TO READ A POEM Chapter one

Message in a Bottle

Heartland

Read these poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you lot're alone in an otherwise nighttime room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning time, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture—the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us—has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a swell distance to discover y'all. I think of Malebranche'southward maxim, "Considerateness is the natural prayer of the soul." This maxim, dearest by Simone Weil and Paul Celan, quoted by Walter Benjamin in his magisterial essay on Franz Kafka, tin can stand as a writer's credo. It also serves for readers. Paul Celan said:

A poem, as a manifestation of linguistic communication and thus essentially dialogue, tin can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the—not e'er greatly hopeful—belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland possibly. Poems in this sense, besides, are under mode: they are making toward something.

Imagine you have gone down to the shore and there, amid the other debris—the seaweed and rotten forest, the crushed cans and dead fish— you observe an unlikely looking bottle from the past. You bring information technology abode and discover a message inside. This letter, so strange and agonizing, seems to have been making its style toward someone for a long fourth dimension, and now that someone turns out to be you lot. The peachy Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, destroyed in a Stalinist camp, identified this experience. "Why shouldn't the poet plough to his friends, to those who are naturally close to him?" he asked in "On the Addressee." But of class those friends aren't necessarily the people around him in daily life. They may be the friends he only hopes exist, or will exist, the ones his words are seeking. Mandelstam wrote:

At a critical moment, a seafarer tosses a sealed bottle into the ocean waves, containing his name and a message detailing his fate. Wandering along the dunes many years later, I happen upon it in the sand. I read the message, note the engagement, the last will and testament of 1 who has passed on. I accept the correct to practise so. I have not opened someone else's post. The message in the canteen was addressed to its finder. I plant it. That means, I have become its secret addressee.

Thus it is for all of us who read poems, who go the cloak-and-dagger addressees of literary texts. I am at dwelling in the middle of the night and suddenly hear myself being called, as if past name. I go over and take downwardly the book—the bulletin in the bottle—because tonight I am its recipient, its posterity, its heartland.

MULTIMEDIA

How to Read a Poem & Autumn in Beloved with Poetry

Washington Post Fiction Editor Ron Charles conducts an in-depth interview with poet Edward Hirsch.

How to Read a Poem

Large Call back is the leading source of skilful-driven, actionable, educational content — with thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Beak Clinton to Neb Nye, nosotros assistance you go smarter, faster.

EDITORIAL REVIEWS

"If you begin with his straightforward book, you may be led to a life of reading poetry, and reading most information technology. Hirsch is particularly skilful considering he so respects the mystery [of poesy]. A lovely book, total of joy and wisdom."
The Baltimore Sun

"Laudable…The reply Hirsch gives to the question of how to read a verse form is: Ecstatically."
Boston Book Review

"Hirsch, a truly gifted poet and scholar, brings the full heat of his literary passion to this enlightening and deeply moving journey into the eye of poetry…. Hirsch offers many soul-touching examples over the grade of his poetic, erudite, and generously self-disclosing celebration of poetry from the days of Ovid to the present. As Hirsch deftly analyzes the nature of lyric poems, dramatic monologues, elegies, and odes, he conducts close readings of the work of a stellar group of poets only he would select… Hirsch's magnificent text is supported by an extensive glossary and superb international reading list."

Booklist

"In short, reading Hirsch's How to Read a Poem is similar a very long evening with a learned and perceptive friend who keeps leaping to his bookshelf for more and better illustrations, and finding ever more connections and revelations"
Newsday

"Edward Hirsch is a passionate and conscientious reader, and the best parts of his book are his rapturously analytic readings of peachy poems…[Hirsch provides] exactly the tools a reader needs in society to read poetry in a fully emotional and intelligent style."
The Boston Phoenix Literary Supplement

"If you lot are pretty sure you don't like poetry, this is the book that is bound to change your listen. Hirsch demonstrates to ane and all that the reading of poems is ane of the supreme pleasures in life."
— Charles Simic

"In his latest volume, Hirsch writes about what poetry is, why it matters, and how nosotros tin open up our imaginations so that its message can reach us and make a difference. In a reading of verse from effectually the world, including works by Stevens, Baudelaire, Plath, and Neruda, Hirsch discovers the meaning of their words and ideas and brings their sublime message domicile."
The American Poet

"Readers will be delighted past Hirsch's intelligent enthusiasm and, in a time when also many are 'prisoners of the gimmicky,' by his boggling conversancy with poetry of all tongues and ages."
— Richard Wilbur

"Hirsch'south contribution is significant, [grounded] in the obvious pleasance he has experienced through words…. Who could resist the wiles of this poetry broker–a writer rapidly becoming the baby boomers' pre-eminent man of letters?"
Detroit Gratis Press(starred review)

"This volume is the product of a lifetime of passionate reflection. Edward Hirsch has written a book that does for verse what Robert Hughes did for modern fine art inThe Shock of the New, and what Cornel West does for multiculturalism inRace Matters. Hirsch writes well-nigh political suffering, give-and-take magic and sensuous splendor, and the urge for human song.How to Read a Poem is a wonderful book for laureate and layman both."
— Garrett Hongo

"In a book of compelling, engaging prose, one of our country's nigh distinguished poets connects us knowingly to his arts and crafts–helps us to appreciate the magic of language as it grows within usa, and shapes our style of seeing and hearing others and our understanding of the world."

— Robert Coles

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