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A review by graywacke
How Does a Poem Mean? by John Ciardi, Miller Williams
4.0
Four and half months later I finished this, reading maybe 4 pages a day in bed before I went to sleep.
For most of the book I thought it was nothing special, just a dated text book with a lot of classic poetry. This wasn't a bad thing. Thanks to this book I read, for the first time:
- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Colleridge
- The Love Song of Alfred Profrock by T.S. Elliot
- Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats
- L'Allegro and Il Penseroso by John Milton
And many others. Those just stand out.
But 3/4 through Ciardi starts to cover poetic metrics and fulcrums. I think I had never covered this before. I found this section fascinating. Maybe I just needed an intro into this stuff, or maybe he did it well. But that part made the book much more rewarding.
This is a 1975 edition of a Ciardi's 1959 original. It's updated with at-the-time recent poetry. Don't expect many women.
For most of the book I thought it was nothing special, just a dated text book with a lot of classic poetry. This wasn't a bad thing. Thanks to this book I read, for the first time:
- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Colleridge
- The Love Song of Alfred Profrock by T.S. Elliot
- Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats
- L'Allegro and Il Penseroso by John Milton
And many others. Those just stand out.
But 3/4 through Ciardi starts to cover poetic metrics and fulcrums. I think I had never covered this before. I found this section fascinating. Maybe I just needed an intro into this stuff, or maybe he did it well. But that part made the book much more rewarding.
This is a 1975 edition of a Ciardi's 1959 original. It's updated with at-the-time recent poetry. Don't expect many women.