How to Read a Poem (review)

Terry Eagleton's How to Read a Poem is a "how-to" book with an agenda. Smart, witty, and provocative, How to Read a Poem argues that critics and their students need to redirect their attention away from poetry's content and contexts and back to its formal elements. As a manual for close reading poetry "after theory," it is instructive, though not without some troubling limitations.

Eagleton begins with a disclaimer reminiscent of his After Theory. Theory did not, he asserts, do literature in. On the contrary, many of the preeminent theorists were "scrupulous" close readers, and careful attention to literary texts never really went away. "Close reading is not the issue," he writes. "The question is not how tenaciously you cling to the text, but what you are in search of when you do so" (2). While Eagleton has much to say about theory in this book, he is primarily concerned with practice, and the book's strength lies in his leading by example—his admirable close readings of poetry. When Eagleton reads poetry, he searches for the ways its formal qualities convey and complicate meaning. In this respect, his procedures are reminiscent of the work of W.K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks and, more recently, Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom.

So readers will not find new methods of close reading in How to Read a Poem. However, like The Verbal Icon or How to Read and Why, How to Read a Poem is more than a primer; it is a form of polemic, and as such it begs the attention of an audience besides the "students and the general reader" for whom Eagleton claims it's intended. Eagleton devotes the first third of his book to defining poetry and the function of literary criticism. It is worth quoting him at length here, from a passage that provides insight into what he values in poetry:

The modern age has been continually divided between a sober but rather bloodless rationalism on the one hand, and a number of enticing but dangerous forms of irrationalism on the other. Poetry, however, offers to bridge this gap. More than almost any other discourse, it deals in the finer nuances of meaning, and thus pays its dues to the value of reasoning and vigilant awareness. At its best, it is a supremely refined product of human consciousness. But it pursues this devotion to meaning in the context of less rational or articulable dimensions of our existence, allowing the rhythms, images and impulses of our subterranean life to speak through its crisp exactitudes. This is why it is the most complete sort of human language that one could imagine—though what constitutes language, ironically, is exactly its incompleteness. Language is what there is always more of.

(Eagleton 2006, 21-22)

"The most complete sort of human language that one could imagine," a "supremely refined product," holding in balance the rational and irrational—the poetry that Eagleton will teach us to read, the poetry that best repays the kind of close analysis he advocates, is formally subtle, intelligently earnest or seriously ironic, steeped in traditions that, in most cases, Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot favored. It is about something in particular, something that matters, and it inevitably draws attention to its own making. By this definition, it follows that How to Read a Poem will be a valuable resource for close reading of poets such as Donne, Pope, Wordsworth, and Eliot; Auden and Yeats appear frequently and favorably in the book. However, students of Byron, Poe, Stein, or any of the Language poets will find little help here. I imagine Stein, for example, beginning with that last phrase, "Language is what there is always more of," and moving forward in directions that Eagleton's definition cannot account for. It seems safe to say that Eagleton has chosen not to account for them because he doesn't believe they count for much. Swinburne and Tennyson are offered up as examples of the beautiful and shallow...