Don't Read Poetry

At once erudite and colloquial (New Yorker), this book provides an accessible introduction to the joys and challenges of poetry In Dont Read Poetry, poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one anotherand how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about poetry, whether we think we like it or think we dont, in order to help us cherishand distinguish amongindividual poems. A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Dont Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingnues and cognoscenti alike.