How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse

Foster emphasizes that his manual is tailored toward poetry written in English rather than any other language. This is important because English has a unique linguistic heritage of guttural Germanic Old English, polite mellifluous French brought in from the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, and the “long, legalistic sounding” Latin words that are a staple of most European languages (75). He shows how anglophone poets work in dialogue with this heritage, often favoring one branch of English’s linguistic ancestry over another. This is the case with the 20th-century Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who “is so known for his love of strong consonants, especially those hard g and k sounds that come down to us from our Germanic ancestors” (21). The fact that these German words were the province of the peasantry aligns with Heaney’s close exploration of nature and ambition to create an earthy, visceral sound rather than an overly smooth one.

It is also important to examine poetry written in English apart from other traditions owing to the prominence of metrical patterning. While the pattern of stressed and unstressed lines is a key component of English poetry, in French, a language where words are not so heavily stressed, syllabic verse based on the number of syllables in a line is more the norm.