You know how people say so-and-so has forgotten more about a subject than most people will ever know? That’s not me, but I have forgotten more poetic thinking than I ever knew. But that’s okay: sometimes it comes back to me little by little. The list below is a small portion of what I once knew. Or maybe it is everything and I flatter myself among all that forgetting. I let some writers and books stand in for a number of others, as when I use Cleanth Brooks as the representative figure for all of those brilliant New Critics of the midcentury period whose students taught the students who were my colleagues and me. The point is that there are a lot more sources out there and these are by no means the last word on words. I have stuck to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, although it pained me to leave Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Sir Philip Sidney on the sidelines. Take this list with a grain or two of salt: it is good enough, but you’ll do better if you get serious about studying poetry. Go forth with my blessing!
Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction (Faber and Gwyer, 1927. He has bigger goals, but the one that most interests us is Barfield’s notion that diction, word choice, and usage constitute acts of imagination to which attention must be paid. It isn’t the place to start, but if you’re serious about poetry, at some point you will come to him.
Harold Bloom, “The Art of Reading Poetry” (HarperCollins, 2004). One of the giants of literary study gives us a nongigantic discussion of reading poems in this introduction to his Best Poems of the English Language. He hits many of the important elements of poetry reading with his usual flair and erudition.
Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (Norton, 1995). Every student of poetry should read Boland on the struggle of a woman to become a poet.
Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (Harvest Books, 1947). This is the work through which a great many of us met the full expression of the New Criticism, with its insistence on staying inside the text and working closely, sometimes exhaustively, with the language of the poem. Under Brooks’s influence, I once wrote four pages on four lines of Shakespeare, but Brooks should not be held responsible.
Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (University of California Press, 1966). A lengthy collection of essays. Burke establishes that language is a particular form of action that works by displacement of meaning. He’s a brilliant rhetorician and student of symbolism in its many guises.
John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean? (Houghton Mifflin, 1960). This is the work that taught a couple of generations of us that it isn’t only what the poem means but also the means by which it creates meaning that matters. Still something close to the industry standard.
C. Day Lewis, The Poetic Image (Jonathan Cape, 1947). Perhaps the first really thorough analysis of its subject. And one of the last. It’s really insightful.
Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem (Blackwell, 2007). Eagleton worries that careful, close reading of poetry is a dying art, and he plans to restore it in this witty, wise book.
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919; reprinted in The Sacred Wood, 1920). The famous study of how poets find their way into the pantheon, from a poet who intended to (and did) arrive there. He gives us the notion of the genuinely new work “taking its place among the monuments.”
Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (Faber and Faber, 1980). I learned as much about poetry in a single afternoon with Heaney as in any graduate seminar I ever took. Heaney’s essays (this is the first collection) are always wise and sharp, offering that same level of insight.
Geoffrey Hill, The Lords of Limit (Oxford University Press, 1984). I stole about half my chapter titles from his essays. Hill was a formidable, brilliant, difficult poet, and he’s all that as an essayist, too, but well worth the labor.
Edward Hirsch, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (Harvest Books, 1999).
John Hollander, Rhyme’s Reason (Yale University Press, 1981).
Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). Well, why not? He’s a poet himself, so much of his hatred is tongue in cheek, and he makes some good points in this small book.
Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook (Mariner Books, 1994). Oliver aims first of all at aspiring poets, but her insights are very helpful to general readers as well.
Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998). A slender book, it discusses exactly what it promises and does so beautifully. And Pinsky has the poetry credentials to back up what he says.
Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, The Making of a Poem (Norton, 2000. The subtitle is A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, and if you wish to know about how the important poetic forms work, this is the book for you.
Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason (Alan Swallow Press, 1947). Winters may be the best reader of poetry who ever lived. From him, and him alone, I learned the notion of secondary stresses (that not all are created equal). He was also a cantankerous old devil, even when he was a young devil, and he raised literary invective to a high art. That alone makes him an interesting read, but you will learn so much from him that you’ll be thankful you undertook the task.