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Don't Read Poetry: A Book about How to Read Poems - Hardcover | Diverse Reads

Don't Read Poetry: A Book about How to Read Poems

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An award-winning poet offers a brilliant introduction to the joys—and challenges—of the genre



In Don't Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another—and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about "poetry," whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish—and distinguish among—individual poems.


A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingénues and cognoscenti alike.

ISBN-13: 9780465094509

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Basic Books

Publication Date: 05-21-2019

Pages: 320

Product Dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d)

Stephanie Burt is a professor of English at Harvard University, and the recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim fellowship for poetry. Her work appears regularly in the New York Times Book Review, New Yorker, London Review of Books, and other journals. She has authored fourteen books of poetry and literary criticism, including Advice from the Lights and The Poem Is You. She lives in Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Introduction Reading Poems 1

1 Feelings 21

2 Characters 61

3 Forms 101

4 Difficulty 153

5 Wisdom 193

6 Community 231

Acknowledgments 277

Permissions 279

Index 285