When you read a poem, you’re reading pure experience packaged up in the wrapping of the poet’s personality.
Keats makes you see, hear, and feel the nightingale and all the accompanying thoughts and feelings the bird sparked in him. The poem then becomes an overflowing well of feeling from which you can drink and become drunk on.
Take a volume of poetry and in one evening you can be in the frost-bitten trenches with Owen, on a storm-battered island with Heaney, or gazing deep into your lover’s eyes with Shakespeare, Donne, and Catullus.
Poetry is the most accessible art form because it’s a vein of pure untapped universal human emotion.
But it’s cut off from the masses because it’s so misunderstood.
Most believe they need a special skillset to appreciate poetry. Or they give up reading a poem the moment they encounter a word they don’t understand.
I know the frustration. I remember hurling a volume of Dylan Thomas across the room as a child because I couldn’t understand what he was talking about.
It’s true that many poets, like Thomas, like e e cummings, like T.S. Eliot, delight in constructing linguistic puzzles. The pleasures of unravelling and solving such puzzles are real, but don’t allow the idea that the chief aim of poetry is to understand it on a cerebral level cloud your thinking.
Poetry, first, foremost, and forever, is about feeling.
Poetry is human experience and feeling compressed, condensed, and distilled down.
I’ll give you the analogy my eighth grade English teacher Mr Jones chalked on the board one spring morning.
Life is like an orange tree.
Poetry is like the juice wrung out of a single orange.
Allow me to develop that analogy further.
That single orange might be love. Or perhaps the poet has peeled back that orange and taken a wedge of unrequited love.
Perhaps the orange is war and the wedge chosen to be compressed is bursting at the skin with the injustices of warfare.
The poet might select an orange that harbours the beauty of nature, one wedge belonging to the birds, another slice belonging to the streams, still another piece pulsing with the rhythm of the winds in the dead of an autumn night.
Some poets, like Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, might even juggle two, three, four, or more oranges at once, perhaps taking a slice or two from each and blending them together in an epic lyric that will endure through the ages.
Why is poetry like juice?
Because poetry, at least great poetry, is truth.
You don’t need to understand every word to feel the truth of something.
But you do need to read poetry a little differently from how you read other literature.
How To Read Poetry
When you read a poem for the first time, read it all the way through without stopping.
Once you’ve read it once in this fashion, read it a second time.
This time read it out loud.
The easiest way to let the truth of a poem into your heart is to feel it on your lips.
Sound contains meaning.
Poetry is the sibling of song.
You wouldn’t expect a song by the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, John Martyn, or insert-your-favourite-artist to carry the same weight printed silently on the page as it would belted from the stage. It’s the same with poetry.
After you’ve read the poem through in this fashion, if it moves you, intrigues you, sweeps you up, you might need to read that poem a hundred more times across your lifetime.
And each time, the poem, if it’s a good one (and what constitutes a good poem is different for everyone) will give you something different.
Like Shakespeare says, “one man in his time plays many parts”. At each stage of life, experience will make you a new person. And with personal evolution comes new insights, new wisdom, new problems you need to solve, and new solutions to past solved problems.
The power of reading, watching, listening to, inhaling King Lear at age seventeen is vastly different from it’s power at twenty-seven, forty, sixty, eighty, and so on.
That’s the joy of poetry.
A single poem can be a companion, a wellspring of comfort and advice, throughout your entire life. A poet deceased over a thousand years can be your friend and mentor, one you are in perpetual iterative life-changing conversation with.
If that style of reading sounds strange to you, remember you are already a master of such consumption. We don’t watch our favourite films only once. Because we hold them so dear, because we wish to live with the characters again and again, because they move us in ways we barely comprehend, we experience our favourite films many times, in different stages of life, with many different people for company.
The same holds true with our favourite albums. As any music critic and lover will tell you, listening through once is just the surface listening experience. You become acquainted with the sound of the album. But you don’t know the structure and themes, you don’t take on the lifeblood as your own, until you’ve feasted upon it in good times and bad across the years of your life.
You absolutely do not need to love every poem you encounter. Detest, despise, and scorn the poems I relish and prize above the rest. I don’t care. But you must fall in love with some poems.
And you do that by approaching each poem with an open heart.
Just say you go to a dance class filled with the hopes of meeting some fabulous man or woman with whom you can fall in love. You’ll dance many dances, but you won’t fall in love with each and everyone. You do, however, need to approach each partner with the nimbleness, enthusiasm, and receptiveness required to make falling in love with the right one a possibility. The same is true with poetry.
Once you’ve read the poem through a few times, at least once out loud, perhaps even listened to someone else listen to it, you’ll want to get down to the business of knowing what its all about.
Ask yourself what words leap out of the poem? When you’ve found those, ask yourself why do those words leap out? Is it by nature of their placement? Their rhyme? Repetition? Some other aspect?
What ideas is this poem exploring? Where is the conflict in the poem? Many poems will have what is known as a “volta”, a turning point, which will reverse the ideas in the poem up until that point (Shakespearean sonnets are exemplary for this). Locate the tensions and turning points. What is the poet communicating about their theme?
Also ask yourself what is the poet not saying?
Poems exploit the latent ambiguity in language. One word can have countless meanings. Metaphors and similes are abundantly employed as poetic device because they leave the message open to interpretation and resists immediate straightforward analysis. In this way, every reader of a poem claims the poem as their own with their unique reading.
When Hemingway was asked the meaning of The Old Man and the Sea, he said it was simply a story about an old man and, you guessed it, the sea. Facetious? Perhaps. But Hemingway’s not alone in responding to requests from critics to deliver the meaning of his art in a neat little package.
Kubrick refused to reveal the meaning pregnant beneath the surface of his masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. The power of a Pollock work of expressionism, paint dripped seemingly haphazardly across canvas, is in what the individual viewer brings to it.
We don’t read the great poets to be told the meaning of life, but rather to experience life and learn by osmosis, a coming together of two souls.
Where do you start with poetry?
There’s an immense amount of joy to be had exploring a volume of one poet’s work, but I’d argue you wouldn’t know which poet to begin exploring until you had sampled a wide range and found one that spoke to you.
It’s no good my recommending you read Simon Armitage’s compilation of the poetry of Ted Hughes, pointing you in the direction of Ariel by Sylvia Plath, thrusting Mary Oliver’s Dog Songs into your hands, or imploring you listen to the spoken word albums of Lawrence Ferlinghetti because they may not rivet and ravage you in the ways they do me.
My recommendation is for you to pick up a decent anthology of poems. I love the Poem A Day anthologies, particularly the one with the forward by Wendy Cope, where you receive a superbly curated poem each day of the year. The Golden Treasury is also fantastic.
Along with these, pick up a volume that will teach you the pleasures of reading, specifically how to read poetry. There is no better guide to learning to read, write, and fall in love with poetry than Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled. And there is no better guide on how to suck every last morsel of nourishment from literature than Mortimer Adler’s How To Read A Book.
You could also start with my playlist of some of my favourite poetry readings of all time.
There’s thirty selections at time of writing.
Aim to listen to one a day, though don’t limit yourself to that if enthusiasm compels you on to consume more. There’s Bluebird by Bukowski, Patti Smith reading Blake, Morgan Freeman reading William Ernest Henley, Anthony Hopkins reciting Dylan Thomas, Sir Ian McKellan giving life to Wordsworth, Marlon Brando bringing Shakespeare to life, and so many more.
Then, once you’ve fallen in love with a certain poem, the next stage in your reading and appreciation of it is to share it.
The idea that reading poetry is a solitary activity is one of the great tragic delusions that have plagued mankind since the last century.
Poetry is savoured best when shared.
So let me know:
What poem last spoke to you?
Bonus: Start writing poetry
The best way to read and appreciate poetry is to learn to write your own.
I recommend enrolling in the Billy Collins MasterClass (review here) for a thorough and enjoyable schooling in the art of reading and writing poetry.