ABSTRACT
Reading Poetry offers a comprehensive and accessible guide to the art of reading poetry. Successive chapters introduce key skills and critical or theoretical issues, enabling users to read poetry with enjoyment, insight and an awareness of the implications of what they are doing.
This new edition includes a new chapter on ‘Post-colonial Poetry’, a substantial increase in the number of end-of-chapter interactive exercises, and a comprehensive Glossary of poetic terms. Not just an add-on, the Glossary works as a key resource for the structuring of particular topics in any individual teaching or learning programme. Many of the exercises and interactive discussions develop not only the skills of competent close reading but also the necessary confidence and experience in locating historical and other contextual information through library or internet searches. The aim is to enhance readers' literary and scholarly competence – and to make it fun!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |142 pages
Formal Introduction
chapter |29 pages
What is Poetry? How do we Read it?
chapter |37 pages
Rhythm and Metre
chapter |42 pages
Creative Form and the Arbitrary Nature of Language
part |152 pages
Textual Strategies
chapter |30 pages
Figurative Language
chapter |34 pages
Poetic Metaphor
chapter |31 pages
Hearing Voices in Poetic Texts
chapter |28 pages
Ambiguity
part |233 pages
Texts in Contexts/Contexts in Texts
chapter |28 pages
Introducing Contexts
chapter |30 pages
Genre
chapter |30 pages
The Sonnet
chapter |33 pages
Allusion, Influence and Intertextuality
chapter |32 pages
Poetry, Discourse, History
chapter |31 pages
The Locations of Poetry
chapter |45 pages
Post-colonial Poetry
part |36 pages
An Open-Ended Conclusion