My final book review is the perfect book to complement this blog. How Does a Poem Mean? by John Ciardi. I first heard about this book from a discussion on Mars Hill Audio. I immediately went to and ta-da the 1959 textbook arrived at my doorstep via Internet magic (more on that tomorrow).

The book was written as one part of a four part introduction to college literature. The first chapter alone is the single best introduction to poetry that I have ever read. I wish I could just read it out loud right this very minute and I am tempted to figure out a way to do that. He makes it clear right out of the starting gate that the modern approach to poetry is from the school of our old friend from Hard Times Mr Gradgrind the spawn of Descartes.

Ciardi says that a poem must be experienced to be understood and loved. The tearing down of its parts is no help at all.

W H Auden was once asked what advice he would give a young who wished to become a poet. Auden replied that he would ask the young man why he wanted to write poetry. If the answer was ‘because I have something important to say,’ Auden would conclude that there was no hope for the young man as a poet. If on the other hand the answer was something like ‘because I like to hang around word and overhear them talking to one another,’ then that young man was at least interested in a fundamental part of the poetic process and there was hope for him.

In the same way that we can’t separate the dancer from the dance we can’t separate the poem from itself.

I love this first chapter so much because Ciardi understands and explains something I have only felt and not been able to articulate. It is that words are fun and poetry is playing. It is a puzzle with intense emotional and intellectual rewards at the end.

Every game ever invented by mankind is a way of making things hard for the fun of it. the great fun, of course, is in making the hard look easy.

He spends a good part of the first chapter illustrating this word play with the Robert Frost poem Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.

He ends by noting:

…that the human insight of the poem, and the technicalities of the poetic devices are inseparable. Each feeds the other. This interplay is the poem’s meaning, a matter not of What It Means (nobody can say entirely what a good poem means) but How It Means- a process one can come much closer to discussing.

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Who can read…The woods are lovely, dark and deep but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep…. without the feeling that something deeply solemn is taking place. It touches us in ways we can’t explain.

Not only is this a great discussion of poetry but it is a wonderful anthology of poems. I feel like I finally have a friend who feels about poetry like I do. Welcome to my book table, Mr Ciardi!

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