Reading Poetry

Dr Tom Furniss is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the Universityof Strathclyde in Glasgow, where he has spent nearly twenty years teaching poetry, literary theory and Romanticism. He is co-author of Ways of Reading, now in its third edition, and Edmund Burke's Aesthetic Ideology (1993). Professor Michael Bath was also at the University of Strathclyde until his retirement, specialising in Renaissance emblem books, iconography, iconology and poetics. His publications include Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (1994) and Decorative Painting in Scotland (2002).    

Contents

 

Acknowledgements

Preface   

Part One Formal Introduction

  1   What Is Poetry? How Do We Read It?

  2   Rhythm and Metre

  3   Significant Form: Metre and Syntax

  4   Creative Form and the Arbitrary Nature of Language  

Part Two Textual Strategies

  5   Figurative Language  

  6   Poetic Metaphor

  7   Hearing Voices in Poetic Texts

  8   Voices with Attitude: Tone and Irony

  9   Ambiguity  

Part Three Texts in Contexts/Contexts in Texts

10    Introducing Contexts

11    Genre  

12    The Sonnet   

13    Allusion, Influence and Intertextuality

14    Poetry, Discourse, History  

15    The Locations of Poetry

16  Post-Colonial Poetry     

Part Four An Open-ended Conclusion

17    Closure, Pluralism and Undecidability   


Glossary

Key to Poems and Passages Discussed or Used for Exercises

Bibliography

Index