One answer, given in books such as Thomas H. Ford’s How to Read a Poem, is that we don’t teach poetry at all. We teach reading – criticism. Author of a highly regarded book on Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air (2018), Ford – an academic at La Trobe University – brings to his subject wide reading, including the poetry of hitherto marginalised writers, deep understanding of the history of criticism and literary theory, a sense of humour and proportion, and a prose style free of unnecessary jargon. The result is a fine book touching on ‘creative reading’ in multiple ways. Yet even Ford would acknowledge, as all good critics must, the degree to which Poetry with a capital P escapes his purview. Why shouldn’t it? It eludes most poets as well.

How to Read a Poem is really about the kind of thinking poetry makes available to us. Ford uses the word ‘reading’ as a noun, a thing we make, adding, ‘This book is intended to help you become a reader in the sense of someone who reads poetry in order to write about it.’ I can imagine a book such as this one escaping the academic setting and reaching bloggers in garrets, book groups willing to try something different, people interested in reading creatively. But what is this enrichment? When Ford avers that ‘you should read poetry because it’s good for you’, my heart sinks. I can tell any three-year-old that spinach is good for her, but that won’t make her eat it. The principal lack in How to Read a Poem is the same thing too much poetry lacks – the allure that makes us remember it, rivets our attention with dramatic power or voice or attitude, the material pleasure that brings us to poetry, or, in Robert Frost’s terms, the delight that ends in wisdom.

This book would be useful in a course on poetry, but also one on poetics, the history of criticism or theory. Ford offers seven steps toward the creation of ‘a reading’, each of which receives its own chapter: ‘Fragment the poem’, ‘Read it aloud’, ‘Describe a form’, ‘Find the weirdness’, ‘Find poetic self-reference’, ‘Find other ambiguities’, and ‘Totalize the reading’. ‘Criticism,’ he writes usefully, ‘is an exercise of making judgments. But it proceeds, perhaps paradoxically, by suspending judgment.’ In a time when judgement, often personal and political, too often precedes reading (both verb and noun), such sentences come as a relief. Ford’s book is humane and intellectually serious, steeped in multiple traditions yet open to the subversion, the freedom that poetry allows.

While his prose is gently discursive and allusive, full of brief examples from a variety of writers, including philosophers, critics, and theorists, the focus of his reading is a single poem, ‘Lines Written Under a Picture of a Girl Burning a Love-Letter’ by Letitia Elizabeth Landon, ‘and first published in a London weekly magazine, the Literary Gazette, on 16 November 1822, when Landon was just twenty years old’. Ford saves the juicy bits of his reading – the feminist point of view and the kind of historical anecdote that proves useful in a classroom – for his final chapter on the big picture, or on ‘totalizing’ the reading. The first six chapters deal with methods of comprehension and awareness that help critics give substance to their essays. As a Wordsworth scholar, he would know ‘we murder to dissect’, and it might be argued that his method does not allow the poem to breathe sufficiently before it is dismembered.

Landon’s poem is formally accomplished, a sonnet with rhymes commenting on each other: ‘thing’ with ‘communing’, ‘brook’ (as in ‘abide’) with ‘look’, etc. The off-rhyme of ‘die’ and ‘history’ provides an occasion to discourse about how sounds – everything they do and do not contain – create shadings of meaning, implications of the sort students often have trouble developing in their essays. Ford would no doubt agree that in the best poetry meaning is never one thing but a field of possibilities. Late in the book, he celebrates ambiguity with the help of Roman Jakobson and William Empson, but his chapter on reading aloud also goes a fair way into the rich implications of sound.

He may be right to put step one, ‘Fragment the poem’, before step two, ‘Read it aloud’, but in my classrooms I always did the reverse, devoting part of every class to performance, asking students to memorise and perform poems of their own choosing. I wanted them to experience how it feels to carry someone else’s language around in your body, move to it, speak it aloud in different circumstances. We don’t really understand the greatest poems – or we understand partially, as we understand life – but we can speak them to one another and reside with them over decades and change in relation to them. In his chapters on weirdness and ambiguity, Ford finally touches on poetry’s attempt to say the unsayable, its deepest measure of life, its way of companionship, and its importance. This is the imaginative realm where poet and reader meet.