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Terry Eagleton. How to Read a Poem. London: Blackwell, 2007. ix + 182 pages.
It is not just with coy irony that Terry Eagleton represents this book as an old-fashioned training guide to explicating poems. Throughout, he stresses that what gets said in a poem occurs within a context of literary form that is constitutive of meaning. Too many students in the humanities now neglect this context, he observes, when they merely search out a poem's views on anti-colonial militancy, queer sexuality, or the like. For their teachers did the same when they went about applying poststructuralist theoretical models to canonical works of literature. Consequently, two generations of scholarly readers currently "do not speak the same language as the critic who said of some lines of T. S. Eliot: 'There is something sad about the punctuation'" (3). As Eagleton laments, "Like thatching or clog dancing, literary criticism seems to be something of a dying art" (1).
In part, How to Read a Poem recovers ground trod many decades ago by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in Understanding Poetry, that primer of New Critical pedagogy which denounced "the heresy of paraphrase." Like Brooks and Warren, Eagleton insists on carefully sifting a poem's language "in all its material density" (2). In a penultimate title-chapter, he even devotes full sections to the poetics of "Tone, Mood and Pitch," "Intensity and Pace," "Texture," "Syntax, Grammar and Punctuation," "Ambiguity," "Punctuation," "Rhyme," "Rhythm and Metre," and "Imagery." And as in Understanding Poetry, the verse specimens he uses to carry out his explications range from the Anglophone metaphysicals to the moderns-from Donne to Doolittle, as it were.
Yet Eagleton has not suddenly turned retro-New Critic. Proclaiming himself still "a politically minded literary theorist" (8), he continues his work begun in Literary Theory of assessing the gains and losses of poststructuralism, while harnessing aspects of its thought for socialist ends. In that work, Eagleton had much negative to say about the poststructuralist turn of the 1970s. Memorably, he charged the movement with consigning rhetorical practice to a hermetic echo-chamber and with droning on "like some bar-room bore" about the inherent self-referentiality of language (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1983; 146). In this guide, his balance sheet looks different. At the outset, he debunks...