UNDERSTANDING POETRY

Shira Wolosky says that "Poetry is language that always means more." Her book The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3, discusses syntax, verse forms, meter, sound and rhyme and much more, and begins by exploring the individual words of poems.

Different from other types of writing or speaking, "poetry," she notes, "is language in which every component element—word and word order, sound and pause, image and echo—is significant, significant in that every element points toward or stands for further relationships among and beyond themselves."

Wolosky goes on to explain:

Its elements are figures, and poetry itself is a language of figures, in which each component can potentially open toward new meanings, levels, dimensions, connections, or resonances. Poetry does this through its careful, intricate pattern of words. It offers language as highly organized as language can be. It is language so highly patterned that there is, ideally, a reason or purpose (or rather, many) for each and every word put into a poem. No word is idle or accidental. Each word has a specific place within an overarching pattern. Together they create meaningful and beautiful designs.

Learning to read poetry is, then, learning the functions of each word within its specific placement in the poem: why each particular word is put into each particular position. Why that word? What is it doing there? How does it fit into the poem, and into what the poem is doing? In poetry there are multiple reasons for choosing and placing words. There is not one single pattern in a poem, but rather a multiplicity of patterns, all of which ideally interlock in wider and larger designs. There are in fact many designs on many levels, where each meaningful word and element points to the next one, in an endless process of imaginative possibility. These intricate patternings of poetry are what generate the essential nature of poetry: its intense figurative power, to always point beyond one meaning or possibility to further ones. This book will identify and explore these figural possibilities and their patterns. It will work from smaller to larger units of organization until the poem stands complete, a building you can enter (and note: stanza means "room" in Italian) and understand in terms of the architecture of its diverse parts, as each contributes to the whole.

Discover more of Wolosky's insights about understanding the words in poems and other elements of poetry