The Cambridge Guide to Reading Poetry

Key features

• Demonstrates how reading poetry enriches our experience and understanding of life and shows - even before engaging with more technical aspects of analysis - that poetry matters
• Furnishes students with an array of differing approaches to the challenge of unlocking a poem, providing worked examples and taking the reader through the process of rising to that challenge
• Puts readers at ease by showing the 'difficulty' of poetry to be something felt by everyone
• Reveals how technical questions are always bound up with what a poem has to say and show us, thus training students to see metre and rhyme as means of expression and not merely matter for dry analysis
• Models the process of independent research step-by-step, showing students where to start, how to develop their ideas, and how to draw conclusions
• Offers substantial guidance on how to organise and write essays, close readings & commentaries