How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse

Foster argues that while many people are curious about poetry, they are also intimidated it. They have the sensation of “feeling somehow overmatched, as if it were a contest and the other side had better equipment and more skill” (3). Literature students often feel as though they do not understand poetry and that there is some hidden meaning put in to trick them.

The fear of poetry extends to those training to be English teachers, who often opt to study novels at the expense of poetry. This means these professionals and their students miss out on understanding some of the most important texts in English and American literature.

Foster argues that poetry enables us to encounter truths about the most heightened moments of human experience, and what makes it “so exciting” is it allows us to “go to intellectual or psychic spaces that we can’t ordinarily access” (7). The best poems have the capacity to change us as human beings. Most importantly, poetry is meant to be enjoyed as well as studied.

Many readers are intimidated by poetry because they do not understand how to read it. For example, many disregard the poem’s punctuation and put too much emphasis at the end of a line.