Fundamental Principles for reading poetry (Note: there are always exceptions to rules.

Im giving you rules that will work almost all the time, but not always, on poems written before, say, 1950 or so (that is, most of the poems that are taught in literature departments, including all the canonical ones). 1. There are no hidden meanings in poetry. The meaning of a poem derives from the way the words are organized in relation to each other as we see them on the page; what we need to get clear on is this pattern of organization. 2. The language of poetry is structured or organized in two fundamental ways: a. according to poetic principles (meter, rhyme, rhythm, line, stanza, conventional forms such as sonnets, figurative language, and so forth), and b. according to principles of grammar and logic. These two kinds of structuring principle must be harmonized by the poet; but to a certain degree there is a tension or conflict between them. 3. Lets take b first. The fact that poetry typically accords in some way with principles of grammar and logic is manifested most clearly in the fact that it is almost always written in sentences. Since it is typically written in sentences, you need to perceive clearly the grammar of the sentence you are reading. Above all, you must have a clear grasp of the subject, the verb, the object of the verb (if there is one), and of how the other elements of the sentence are related to the subject and verb. 4. The sentences in poems are almost always either grammatical or nearly so; but they are often complicated, and often in an unusual and therefore confusing order. In order to see clearly what the sentence is saying, you need to rearrange the words into a clearer order. The most common type of confusing word order in poetry is inversion of the syntax, in which we have to wait until the end to get the subject and verb. The clearest sentences are usually the ones that have the subject and verb at the beginning. 5. I will refer to the logical and grammatical aspect of the sentences of poems as their discursive structure. Discourse is language used for communication, as we use it in an essay or an ordinary conversation; and poems function, along one dimension, discursively. 6. The fundamental energy of poems is built up out of binary oppositions. In its most basic form, a binary opposition is the juxtaposition of two words (hence binary) that in some way clash with each other or are contradictory or anomalous in some way. Binary oppositions create a dynamic tension (they conflict with each other, and this conflict is a kind of energy); they are dissonant, and this dissonance is what gives force to the language of the poem. 7. The words on each side of a binary opposition will be linked to other words with which they, so to speak, form an alliance. These alliances are consonant rather than dissonant. 8. An entire group of allied or consonant words on one side of a binary opposition together produce a major dissonance in opposition to the entire group of consonant words on the other side of the binary. (So night, dark, storm, and pain, for example, might in a given poem be consonant with each other, and

dissonant with a group composed of day, bright, sunny, and pleasure on the other.) 5. A poem is typically made up of a beginning, a building of tension, a turn, and a resolving of tension, culminating in closure. This series of elements is what we look for when we try to make out the form or structure of an individual poem. 6. The most important formal moments are the turn and the closure; but in order to perceive how they work, we have to understand how the whole poem is constructed. 7. Every word, every object, every figure in a poem has a variety of possible meanings; the question the formalist reader asks is not how many possible meanings can I think of? but rather, which of the possible meanings is the one that is activated by the specific context this poem gives it? Which one, or which ones, make the most sense given what this whole poem seems to be doing?