67 pages • 2 hours read
How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse
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Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Why Is Poetry”
Part 3, Chapter 15 Summary: “Wanted: A Few Good Martians”
Foster refers to “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” (1979), Craig Raine’s poem about an alien coming to earth to illustrate the poet’s perennial goal of ‘“making strange,’ taking commonplace elements of our experience and making them alien to us, as if we never saw them before” (172). Foster elaborates that “defamiliarization splits in two main ways: seeing things differently and saying things differently” (173). While Raine and the visionary 19th-century British poet William Blake’s genius lies in seeing differently, other poets want to deliver universal truths in a completely new way. For example, the 1910s Imagist poets supplanted centuries of elaborate description with the presentation of stark, simple images. T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land used Imagist techniques over 434 lines. Here, the seemingly disconnected images reflect the culture’s sense of loss and incomprehension following the unparalleled destruction of the First World War. Rather than telling readers what to think, Eliot allows them to fill in the gaps with their own meaning.
Part 3, Conclusion Summary: “Supreme Fictions”
Foster concludes his book with an exploration of the reasons poetry, and nonnarrative lyric poetry in particular, continues to be so powerful. He argues that the impulse toward self-expression is universal and has been a feature of humanity since the beginning. As a result, the instinct to write poetry is universal. Although the lyric’s brevity does not make it the best vehicle for conveying story, it is unmatched in its ability to capture an instant, whether in the contemplation of an object, an ephemeral event, or a passing mood. The topic of ephemerality is especially potent, as poets are able to play with time, suspending it in a freeze frame or projecting into a past or future. Thus, poems can “contain multitudes in miniature” (186). The American poet Wallace Stevens coined the phrase “supreme fictions” to describe the poem’s capacity to test and stretch our imaginations as it “cannot be read without the application of our creativity to that of the poets” (186). The making of a supreme fiction is therefore an active and collaborative process.
Part 3 Analysis
As befits its title, this final section of the book examines the motivations behind the creation of poetry and why the genre continues to be important. Foster creates notions of the universality of poetry when he imagines the genre and the impulse toward self-expression has been around for as long as humanity. Here, Foster balances two competing considerations—the near universal will to self-expression and saying something about the human condition with the need to do it differently enough to stand out. Foster gives the impression that there is almost too much self-expression in the world and that the best poets and poems stand out for their originality of voice and vision. To this end, he discusses the important tool of defamiliarization, which Viktor Shklovsky defines as a process of making the things we take for granted strange. This can occur on a conceptual level, for example when Raine’s alien describes the mundane experience of defecation with “everyone’s pain has a different smell,” thus provoking us to see a routine act differently (172). It can also be done on an aesthetic level, as with the experiments of the Imagist poets, who remove punctuation and continuity of subject, thus making the reader work harder. Overall, a reader should see the defamiliarization a poem provides as flattering, as it proves the poet’s confidence in the reader’s ability to provide a satisfying interpretation. By extension, the reader learns that they too can be as creative as the writer and that the experience of the poem has developed their capacity for empathy, interpretation, and innovation. This comes full circle with Foster’s notion early on in the guide that poetry has the capacity to change readers.
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