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Description
Eagleton, Terry. 2006. How to Read a Poem. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. $59.95 hc. $19.95 sc. 192pp.
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... |
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