Understanding Poetry

Brooks & Warren's text is rightfully a classic for advanced high school or college undergraduate readers. They provide a useful overview of many important topics that one learn for the analysis of poetry. At the same time as they pursue the intellectual approach to poetry, they always keep an eye on appreciating the beauty of poetry. However, the text is dated and a bit flawed. This represents a somewhat simplified New Critical approach to poetry. Their emphasis on close reading is admirable, but they have a kind of rigid, doctrinaire sense of what poetry "should" be. A professor of mine once called it a kind of blockheaded organicism. Also, their chapter on metrics I find to be poorly thought out; their approach is confusing and a bit thick. Their system of notation is more complex than necessary and not very expressive, and they approach it mostly as a mathematical exercise, not connecting it to analysis of a poem's meaning(s). Still, all things considered, not bad as a textbook, and it has a wide selection of poems. Not too useful for advanced students of literature.

I would just like to add to these good reviews that Understanding Poetry was the text used by Allen Tate in his poetry class at the University of Minnesota in 1966. (You had to sign up early to get into this class because it filled up fast!) Tate taught the New Criticism which emphasized the text as an autotelic artifact, something complete with in itself, written for its own sake, unified in its form and not dependent on its relation to the author's life or intent, history, or anything else. He began each session by reading a single poem from this text, which somehow made it clear just by his reading. Then he explained each line in careful detail. It was a wonderful class, and this book contines this kind of close reading. There is no Anxiety of Influence in the New Criticism.

For most of my life, I hated poetry. One year, I had a great English teacher who really showed me what poetry was all about and got me interested. This book was just what I needed. I bought it because it had the look of the best prose book around (Writing Prose: Techniques and Purposes, Oxford University Press). It is a great introduction to poetry. It's full of great poems. It's just great. Gosh. You're going to love it. I get excited just thinking about it.Anyway, it's basically just a big six-hundred page anthology of poems, *with commentary*. And that's key. There are a lot of great poems that you just can't get without a little bit of context.My adventures in poetry never went further than this book, but I still read it often.

If there is only one book that teachers should let literature students read, it should be this one. Definitely the Bible of writers (and amateur writers), critics, or those who simply love the written Word. Cleanth Brooks gives as wide a perspective as possible about the different literary movements and the notable poets.It's just a shame that this book is VERY hard to find. A reprint would benefit English literature programs greatly.